The Cornhill Magazine, February, 1860 (Vol. I, No. 2)Various
General
The Cornhill Magazine, February, 1860 (Vol. I, No. 2)
Various
England -- Periodicals; English literature -- Periodicals; Short stories, English -- Periodicals
Little boy Hogarth, you shall often pass by the banqueting-house--ay,
and admire Hans Holbein’s wondrous gate of red brick, tesselated in
quaint and beauteous design; of which the fragments, when the gate
was pulled down in 1760, were begged by William, Duke of Cumberland,
and the pieces numbered, with the project of having them transferred
to Windsor park and there re-erected as a royal ducal lodge. But
the project was never carried out, and the duke probably forgot all
about it, or found something more worth begging for than a lot of old
building materials. So exit Whitehall palace: buttery, bakehouse, wood
and coal yards, spicery, charcoal-house, king’s privy cellar, council
chamber, hearth-money office, and other fripperies in stone. It must
have been a grand place, even as the heterogeneous pile that existed
in William Dutchman’s time; but if James or Charles had possessed
the funds to rebuild it according to Inigo Jones’s magnificent plan,
of which the banqueting-house is but an instalment, the palace of
Whitehall would have put to the blush the Baths of Diocletian, the
golden house of Nero--yea, and the temple which Erostratus burnt, to
prove that all things were vanity, even to incendiarism.
Will it please you to walk into the city, now that we have done with
Westminster, any day in these three years of the moribund seventeenth
century. London is busy enough, noisy enough, dirty enough; but not so
smoky. There is little or no foot pavement; but there are plenty of
posts and plenty of kennels--three hundred and eleven, I think, between
Newgate and Charing Cross. When the humorous operation, resorted to
with ugly frequency about this time, of whipping a man at the cart’s
tail, takes place, the hangman gives the poor wretch a lash at every
kennel the near wheel of the cart grates against. Newgate to Ludgate,
Charing Cross to the “Cockpit” at Westminster, are considered the
mildest pilgrimages to be undergone by these poor flagellated knaves;
but Charing to Newgate is the real _via dolorosa_ of stripes. That
pilgrimage was reserved for the great objects of political hatred and
vengeance in James II.’s reign--for Titus Oates and Thomas Dangerfield.
The former abominable liar and perjurer, stripped of his ambrosial
periwig and rustling silk canonicals, turned out of his lodgings in
Whitehall, and reduced to the very last of the last, is tried and
sentenced, and is very nearly scourged to death. He is to pay an
enormous fine besides, and is to lie in Newgate for the remainder of
his life. I wonder that like “flagrant Tutchin,” when shuddering under
a sentence almost as frightful, he did not petition to be hanged:
yet there seems to be an indomitable bull-headed, bull-backed power
of endurance about this man Oates--this sham doctor of divinity, this
Judas spy of Douai and St. Omer, this broken chaplain of a man-of-war,
this living, breathing, incarnate Lie--that enables him to undergo
his punishment, and to get over its effects somehow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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