Charles's Horse a Satirist. Old Charing Cross, and New St. Martin's Church. - Statue of Charles I. - Execution of Regicides. - Ben Jonson. - Wallingford House, now the Admiralty. - Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; Sir Walter Scott's Account of him. Misrepresentation of Pope respecting his Death. Locket's Ordinary. - Sir George Etherege. - Prior and his Uncle's Tavern. — Thomson.—Spring Gardens. Mrs. Centlivre. Dorset Place, and Whitcombe Street, &c., formerly Hedge Lane.The Wits and the Bailiffs. Suffolk Street. - Swift and Miss Vanhomrigh. — Calves' Head Club, and the Riot it occasioned. -Scotland Yard. — Pleasant Advertisement. — Beau Fielding and his Eccentricities. Vanbrugh. — Desperate Adventure of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. N the reign of Edward I., on the country road from London to Westminster, stood the hamlet of Charing; a rustic spot, containing a few houses, and the last cross set up by that Prince in honour of the restingplaces of his wife's body on its way to interment in the Abbey. The Cross was originally of wood, but afterwards of stone. The reader may see it in the old map of London by Aggas. He will there observe, that towards the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, Charing Cross was united with London on the Strand side, and at little intervals with Whitehall; but Spring Gardens was then and long after what its name implies; and, in the reign of Charles II., Hedge lane (now Whitcomb Street) and the Haymarket were still real lanes and passages into the fields. In Elizabeth's time, you might set out from the site of the present Pall-mall, and, leaving St. Giles in the Fields on the right hand, walk all the way to Hampstead without encountering perhaps a dwelling-place. Lovers plucked THE VILLAGE OF CHARING, FROM AGGAS'S MAP. flowers in Cranbourne Alley, and took moonlight walks in St. James's market. On this spot, in Dr. Johnson's opinion, is to be found the fullest "tide of human existence" in the metropolis. We know not how that may be at present when the tide is so full everywhere; but Charing Cross has long been something the reverse of a rural village, and is now exhibiting one of the newest and grandest evidences of an improving metropolis. By way of north front, the Mews (formerly the mews of the King's falcons) has given way to a sorry palace for the Fine Arts; on the west is a handsome edifice including the new college of Physicians; on the east St. Martin's church has obtained its long desired opening: and in the midst of these buildings and of the Strand-end is a new square, named after the greatest of our naval victories, adorned with a column surmounted by their hero, and disgraced by a couple of shabby fountains Here also is an equestrian statue of George the Fourth. What for? "In the reign of Henry VIII.," says Pennant, "speaking of St. Martin's, "a small church was built here at the King's expense, by reason of the poverty of the parishioners, who possibly were at that period very poor. In 1607 it was enlarged because of the increase of buildings. In 1721 it was found necessary to take the whole down, and in five years from that time this magnificent temple was completed at the expense of near thirty-seven thousand pounds. This is the best performance of Gibbs, the architect of the Ratcliffe Library. The steeple is far the most elegant of any of that style which I named the pepper-box; and with which (I beg pardon of the good people of Glasgow) I marked their boasted steeple of St. Andrew."* Our lively biographer seems chiefly to admire the steeple of this church. The Corinthian portico, we believe, is the usual object of praise. Both of them may deserve praise separately; nor, indeed, will their size and situation allow them to be regarded with indifference in conjunction; but the elevation of the steeple on the neck of the church, or without any apparent or proper base to rest upon, is a fault not to be denied; and Mr. Pennant perhaps would not have been in the wrong, had he found an ill name for steeples in general, as well as for the species which he "peppered." Steeples, however noble, and porticoes, however Greek, can never truly coalesce. The finest steeple with a portico to it is but an excrescence and an anomaly, a horn growing out of the church's neck. The Italians felt this absurdity so much, that they have often made a separate building of the steeple, converting it into a beautiful tower aloof from the church, as in the instances of the famous Hanging Tower in Pisa, and the Campanile in Florence. Suppose a shaft like the Monument, in a space near St. Martin's church, and the church itself a proper building with a portico, like St. * Page 143. Paul's Covent Garden, and you have an improvement in the Italian style. The best thing to say for -sharpèd steeples high shot up in air (as Spenser calls them) is, that they seem to be pointing to heaven, or running up into space like an intimation of interminability. An idea of this kind is supposed to have given rise to them. But they always have a meagre, incongruous look, considered in their union with the body to which they are attached. Their best appearance is at a distance, and when they are numerous, as in the view of a great city; but even then, how inferior are they to the massive dignity of such towers as those of Westminster Abbey, or to a dome like that of St. Paul's! The origin of the word Charing is unknown. The cross was destroyed during the Reformation. The spot where it stood is occupied by the statue of Charles I. originally the property of the Earl of Arundel, for whom it was a cast by Le Sœur in 1633. It was not placed in its present situation till the decline of the reign of Charles II. The pedestal is the work of Grinling Gibbons. The statue had been condemned by parliament to be sold and broken in pieces; "but John River the Brazier who purchased it," says Pennant, "having more taste or more loyalty than his masters, buried it unmutilated and showed to them some broken pieces of brass in token of his obedience. M. D'Archenholz gives a diverting anecdote of this brazier, and that he cast a vast number of handles of knives and forks in brass, which he sold as made of the broken statue. They were bought with great eagerness by the royalists, from affection to their monarch; by the rebels as a mark of triumph over the murdered sovereign." * The sovereign now faces White * Pennant, p. 112. He quotes Archenholz's Tableau d'Angleterre, i. 183. hall as if in triumph: yet behind the Banquetting house lurks a statue of another of this unfortunate race, who lost his throne for attempting to renew the dictatorial spirit which cost his ancestor his head. The omission of the horse's girth in this statue has been thought a singular instance of forgetfulness in the artist. But it is hardly possible he could have forgotten it. Most likely he took a poetical licence, and rejected what might have hurt the symmetry of his outline. Charles's memory, like his life, was destined to be connected with tragedies. On this spot, before the statue was erected, a number of the regicides were executed with tortures; and, till of late years, it was a place for the pillory. Harrison died there, Scrope, Colonel Jones, Hugh Peters, and others of those extraordinary men, who, in welcoming a bloody death, gave the last undoubted proofs that they were real patriots as well as bigots. The spirit in which they died (bold and invincible, though in the very glow and loquacity evincing that lingering love of life which is so affecting to one's own mortality) had such an effect on the public, that the king was advised not to have any more such executions near the court, and the scaffold was accordingly removed to Tyburn. A ghastly story is related of Harrison ; — that after he was cut down alive (according to his sentence), and had his bowels removed and burnt before his face by the executioner, he rose up and gave the man a box on the ear. He had behaved with great patience before this half-death; so that there appears to have been something of delirium in this action, the action, perhaps, of a being feeling himself to be no longer under the ordinary condition of his species. -- The particular sort of religious enthusiasm evinced by these men is now as obsolete as some of the absurdities which they fought against, and as others which they would |