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"Supper being ended, and music-books, according to custom, being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part, earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses, I protested unfeignedly that I could not, every one began to wonder-yea, some whispered to others, demanding how I was brought up." In a condition of society like this, the street music must have been worth listening to. "A noise of musicians," as a little band was called, was to be found everywhere; and they attended upon the guests in taverns and ordinaries, and at "good men's feasts" in private houses. In The Silent Woman,' it is said, "the smell of the venison, going through the streets, will invite one noise of fiddlers or other;" and again, "They have intelligence of all feasts; there's good correspondence betwixt them and the London cooks." Feasts were then not mere occasions for gluttony and drunkenness, as they became in the next generation. As the drunkenness went on increasing, the taste for music went on diminishing. In the next century, the Tatler' writes, "In Italy nothing is more frequent than to hear a cobbler working to an opera tune; but, on the contrary, our honest countrymen have so little an inclination to music, that they seldom begin to sing till they are drunk." Thus we went on till the beginning of the present century, and indeed later. The street music was an indication of the popular taste. Hogarth's blind hautboy-player, and his shrieking balladsinger, are no caricatures. The execrable sounds which the lame and the blind produced were the mere arts of mendicancy. The principle of extorting money by hideous sounds was carried as far as it could go by a fellow of the name of Keiling, called Blind Jack, who performed on the flageolet with his nose. Every description of street exhibition was accompanied with these terrible noises. The vaulter, and the dancing lass, and the tumbler creeping through a hoop, and the puppet-showman, and the dancing dogs, and the bear and monkey, had each their own peculiar din, whether of drum, fiddle, horn, or bagpipes, compared with which the music of Morose's bear-ward and fencer would have been as the harmony of the spheres.

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In the fashionable squares, towards the close of the last century, matters were a little mended. Dayes, who published a collection of street views about 1789,

has given us the group which concludes our paper. Here we have the organ, the triangle, the tambourine, and the hurdy-gurdy,-each striving which should be loudest, and winning by their united exertions the applause of all bystanders. After the peace our thoroughfares gradually resounded with the somewhat improved melody of the street-singers of Paris; and a lady with a neat coiffure accompanied the organ with the monotonous chant of "Le gai Troubadour." An Italian was now and then imported with his guitar; and his knowledge of harmony compensated for his somewhat cracked voice. All at once glee-singers started up; and they are now common. Then a "noise" or two of really tolerable instrumental performers were to be found in Portland Place and other streets of the west; and even those who were familiar with Rossini might stop to listen. We are still advancing; and in a few years the Act which protects housekeepers from the nuisance of street musicians will be a dead letter.

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We are apt to think and speak of the Roman occupation of Britain as if it had been little more than a mere inroad into the country-a brief episode having scarcely anything to do with the main course of our history. Our modern English civilization has over its whole surface so completely Teutonic and feudal a colour, that we can hardly conceive ourselves to have been other than Normans or Saxons from our first emerging out of barbarism. Yet our island was in great part a Roman country, in a certain sense, for not less than six hundred years. So long was it from the invasion of Julius Cæsar, which, if it did not actually make us tributaries to Rome, not only brought us into constant intercourse with Romanized Gaul, but, as Strabo, writing within fifty years after, records, made almost the whole island familiarly known to the Romans, till the last remnants of the social fabric raised by that great people were thrown down and swept away by the Saxons in the latter part of the sixth century. That is very nearly one-third of the whole period that has elapsed from the landing of Cæsar to the present hour. It is within a few years of as long a time as the English have been settled in Ireland. It is a portion of our history of as great extent as has passed since the middle of the reign of Henry III.—since the intermediate point between the grant of Magna Charta and the establishment of the House of Commons- a date which may be said to stand almost at the commencement of the whole system of our existing civilization. Or even if we reckon the era of Roman Britain only from the expedition of Claudius, which commenced the colonization of the country a hundred years after its first invasion, to the breaking up of the imperial government in the beginning of the fifth century, still here is a period of above three centuries and a half-or as long as from the present day back to the wars of the Roses. To a Briton, therefore,

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in the last days of the Roman dominion, the retrospect even over this period only, during which it had been as completely established on the banks of the Thames as on the banks of the Tiber, was as extended as that which takes in to us of the present day the whole rise and progress of the modern political system of Europe. It was the same as it is to us now to cast our view back over whatever has grown up and happened in England during the whole rule of the House of Hanover, the House of Stuart, and the House of Tudor-including the Revolution, the Great Rebellion, the Union of the Crowns, the Reformation-being probably, at the least, three-fourths of the entire amount of the political and social causes which have operated to make the country and the people what they

now are.

There is sound sense and truth, as well as elegant fancy, in what has been written by the excellent Camden: "Whilst I treat of the Roman empire in Britain (which lasted, as I said, about 476 years), it comes into my mind how many colonies of Romans must have been transplanted hither in so long a time; what numbers of soldiers were continually sent from Rome, for garrisons; how many persons were despatched hither, to negotiate affairs, public or private; and that these, intermarrying with the Britons, seated themselves here, and multiplied into families; for wherever, says Seneca, the Roman conquers, he inhabits. So that I have oft-times concluded that the Britons might derive themselves from the Trojans by these Romans, who doubtless descended from the Trojans, with greater probability than either the Arverni, who from Trojan blood styled themselves brethren to the Romans, or the Mamertini, Hedui, and others, who upon fabulous grounds grafted themselves into the Trojan stock. For Rome, that common mother, as one calls her, challenges all such as citizens

Quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit.
Whom conquered she in sacred bonds hath tied."*

However, we do not desire to stand pledged to the Trojan part of this speculation.

The spot on which London is built, or at least, that on which the first buildings were most probably erected, was pointed out by nature for the site of a city. It was the suspicion of the sagacious Wren, as we are informed in the 'Parentalia,' that the whole valley between Camberwell Hill and the hills of Essex must have been anciently filled by a great frith or arm of the sea, which increased in width towards the east; and that this estuary was only in the course of ages reduced to a river by the vast sand-hills which were gradually raised on both sides of it by the wind and tide, the effect being assisted by embankments, which on the Essex side are still perfectly distinguishable as of artificial origin, and are evidently works that could only have been constructed by a people of advanced mechanical skill. Wren himself ascribed these embankments to the Romans; and it is stated that a single breach made in them in his time cost 17,000l. to repair it-from which we may conceive both how stupendous must have been the labour bestowed on their original construction, and of what indispensable utility they are still found to be. In fact, were it not for this ancient barrier, the broad and fertile meadows stretching along that border of the river would still be a mere marsh, or a bed of sand overflowed by the water, though left perhaps dry in many places on the

* Britannia, Gibson's Translation; p. cvii. Edit. of 1722.

retirement of the tide. We have in a former paper* expressed an opinion, that Dion Cassius must have been mistaken in stating that there was a bridge over the Thames at the time of the invasion of Claudius, or rather of his general, Aulus Plautius, in A.D. 43; and, indeed, it is clearly impossible that there could have been anything of the kind where he places it-only a little above the mouth of the river +-if we are to understand that expression in the sense which it would now convey. But if the lower part of the Thames at this early date presented the appearance which has just been supposed, of a spacious estuary or frith rather than a river, its mouth, or, as Dion calls it, the place where it discharges itself into the ocean,‡ might be held to be only a little below London-just as at this day we consider the mouth of the Forth to be, not at Dunbar or North Berwick, but many miles higher up at the head of the frith. It is remarkable that Ptolemy calls the Thames, when he speaks of it as forming the southern boundary of the Trinobantes, not a river, but an estuary. So also does Tacitus, who had probably been in Britain. And Cæsar's description, too, would seem to imply, that what was called the River Thames when he visited the country was only the upper part of what now goes by that name. Kent, or Cantium, which we know from Ptolemy extended at this date at least as far to the west as it still does, he expressly describes as omnis maritima-wholly lying on the sea-coast—without a hint of any part of it being bounded by the river.§ And afterwards, in mentioning the Thames, he seems distinctly to speak of it as bounding the territory of Cassivellaunus only: he conducts his forces, not to that part of the Thames which flows past the territory in question, or to the Thames where it so flowsbut, simply, to the Thames and into the territory of Cassivellaunus—“ ad flumen Tamesin, in fines Cassivellauni." He had previously told us that the said territory was divided from the maritime states by the river called the Thames, at the distance of about eighty miles from the sea-that is to say, from the part of the coast, near Sandwich, where he had landed. All these expressions might possibly be made to bear an interpretation conformable to the present appearance of the country, and the notion we now have of the junction of the river with the sea about the same point at which it receives the Medway or the Swale; but they certainly seem to be more apt and natural if understood in reference to a different state of things-when, as we have supposed, what was called the Thames seemed to be swallowed up in a branch of the sea within perhaps two or three miles of where London now stands. Above all, we submit that the expressions of Dion Cassius in describing the place where, as he says, the Thames meets the ocean are quite inapplicable to what the river could ever have been at its present mouth, and must be referred to a point much higher up. They exactly set before us the irregular diffusion of the water over the whole valley through the midst of which the Thames now flows, which would take place before the river was brought in the way that has been explained within its present bounds, and thereby deepened in its mid-channel as well as greatly reduced in width-in fact, narrowed from a broad expanse of pools and shallows, assuming, probably, when the tide rose the appearance of one extended

See No. V.-London Bridge.

Dion's words are—die yspúgus öxíyov ära.-Hist. Rom. lib. lx. c. 20.

† καθ' ὅ ἔν τε τὸν ὠκεανὸν ἐκβάλλει. Ibid.

§ De Bell. Gall. v. 14.

|| Id. v. 18.

Id. cap. 11.

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