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Leigh Hunt. The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events
The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I. ST. PAUL'S, AND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
CHAPTER II. ST. PAUL'S AND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
CHAPTER III. FLEET STREET
CHAPTER IV. THE STRAND
CHAPTER V. LINCOLN'S INN, AND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII. DRURY LANE, AND THE TWO THEATRES IN DRURY LANE AND COVENT GARDEN
CHAPTER VIII. COVENT GARDEN CONTINUED AND LEICESTER SQUARE
CHAPTER IX. CHARING CROSS AND WHITEHALL
CHAPTER X. WOLSEY AND WHITEHALL
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
Footnote
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Leigh Hunt
Published by Good Press, 2021
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Denham's prediction did no credit to the prophetic reputation of poetry. Of the fabric which was to be unassailable by zeal or fire the poet himself lived to see the ruin, begun by the one and completed by the other; and he himself, curiously enough, a short time before his death, was engaged as the King's surveyor-general in (nominally at least) presiding over the erection of the new Cathedral—the successor of the "sacred pile," of which he had thus sung the immortality.
When Jones began the repairs and additions of which his portico formed a part, in 1633, the rubbish that was removed was carried, Mr. Malcolm informs us, to Clerkenwell fields, where, he suggests, "some curious fragments of antiquity may still remain."[20] The very beauty of this portico, surmounted with its strange pediment and figures, and dragging at its back that heap of deformity, completed the monstrous look of the whole building, like a human countenance backed by some horned lump. But this was nothing to the moral deformities of the interior. Old St. Paul's, throughout almost the whole period of its existence, at least from the reign of Henry the Third, was a thoroughfare, and a "den of thieves." The thoroughfare was occasioned probably by the great circuit which people had been compelled to make by the extent of the wall of the old churchyard—a circumference a great deal larger than it is at present. There is a principle of familiarity in the Catholic worship which, while it excites the devotional tenderness of more refined believers, is apt to produce the consequence, though not the feelings, of contempt among the vulgar. Fear hinders contempt; but when license is mixed with it, and the fear is not in action, the liberties taken are apt to be in proportion. We have seen, in a Catholic chapel in London, a milk-maid come into the passage, dash down her pails, and having crossed herself, and applied the holy water with reverence, depart with the same air with which she came in. The next thing to setting down the pails, under the circumstances above mentioned, would have been to creep with them through the church. Porters and loiterers would follow; and by degrees the place of worship would become a place of lounging and marketing, and intrigue, and all sorts of disorder. In the reign of Edward the Third, the King complains to the Bishop that the "eating-room of the canons" had "become the office and work-place of artisans, and the resort of shameless women." The complaint turned out to be of no avail; nor had the mandate of the Bishop a better result in the time of Richard the Third, though it was accompanied with the penalty of excommunication. An Act was passed to as little purpose in the reign of Philip and Mary; and in the time of Elizabeth the new opinions in religion seem to have left the place fairly in possession of its chaos, as if in derision of the old. The toleration of the abuse thus became a matter of habit and indifference; and a young theologian, afterwards one of the witty prelates of Charles the Second (Bishop Earle), did not scruple to make it the subject of what we should now call a "pleasant article."
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