A WORD WITH A SKYLARK (A CAPRICE OF HOMESICKNESS)[21]
[From Songs of Nature, edited by John Burroughs (New York, 1901)]
THE GIFT OF TEARS[22]
[From The Gift of Tears (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1906)]
Boyd Winchester, author of a charming book on Switzerland, was born in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, September 23, 1836. He came to Kentucky when a youth and entered Centre College, Danville, where he studied for three years. He subsequently spent two years at the University of Virginia. Mr. Winchester was graduated from the Law School of Louisville, Kentucky, in 1858, and that city has been his home ever since. He rose rapidly in his profession; and he later served a single term in the Kentucky legislature, and two terms in the lower House of Congress. President Cleveland appointed Mr. Winchester United States Minister to Switzerland, in 1885, and the next four years he resided at Berne. While in Switzerland Mr. Winchester was an ardent student of the country's history and a keen observer of its aspects and institutions. On his return to the United States he wrote his well-known book, The Swiss Republic (Philadelphia, 1891). A fire his publishers, the Lippincotts, suffered shortly after his volume was issued, destroyed the unsold copies, and the small first edition was soon exhausted. The work has thus become exceedingly scarce.
Bibliography. National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York, 1906, v. xiii); General Catalogue of Centre College.
LAKE GENEVA[23]
[From The Swiss Republic (Philadelphia, 1891)]
The Lake of Geneva is the largest of Western Europe, being fifty-seven miles long, and its greatest width nine miles; it has its storms, its waves, and its surge; now placid as a mirror, now furious as the Atlantic; at times a deep-blue sea curling before the gentle waves, then a turbid ocean dark with the mud and sand from its lowest depths; the peasants on its banks still laugh at the idea of there being sufficient cordage in the world to reach the bottom of the Genfer-See. It is eleven hundred and fifty-four feet above the sea, and having the same depth, its bottom coincides with the sea-level; the water is of such exceeding purity that when analyzed only 0.157 in 1000 contain foreign elements. The lake lies nearly in the form of a crescent stretching from the southwest towards the northeast. Mountains rise on every side, groups of the Alps of Savoy, Valais, and Jura. The northern or the Swiss shore is chiefly what is known as a cote, or a declivity that admits of cultivation, with spots of verdant pasture scattered at its feet and sometimes on its breast, with a cheery range of garden, chalet, wood, and spire; villas, hamlets, and villages seem to touch each other down by the banks, and to form but one town, whilst higher up, they peep out from among the vineyards or nestle under the shade of walnut-trees. At the foot of the lake is the white city of Geneva, of which Bancroft wrote, "Had their cause been lost, Alexander Hamilton would have retired with his bride to Geneva, where nature and society were in their greatest perfection." The city is divided into two parts by the Rhone as it glides out of the basin of the lake on its course towards the Mediterranean. The Arve pours its turbid stream into the Rhone soon after that river issues from the lake. The contrast between the two rivers is very striking, the one being as pure and limpid as the other is foul and muddy. The Rhone seems to scorn the alliance and keeps as long as possible unmingled with his dirty spouse; two miles below the place of their junction a difference and opposition between this ill-assorted couple is still observable; these, however, gradually abate by long habit, till at last, yielding to necessity, and to the unrelenting law which joined them together, they mix imperfect union and flow in a common stream to the end of their course. At the head of the lake begins the valley of the Rhone, where George Eliot said, "that the very sunshine seemed dreary mid the desolation of ruin and of waste in this long, marshy, squalid valley; and yet, on either side of the weary valley are noble ranges of granite mountains, and hill resorts of charm and health...." Standing at almost any point on the Lake of Geneva, to the one side towers Dent-du-Midi, calm, proud, and dazzling, like a queen of brightness; on the other side is seen the Jura through her misty shroud extending in mellow lines, and a cloudless sky vying in depths of color with the azure waters. So graceful the outlines, so varied the details, so imposing the framework in which this lake is set, well might Voltaire exclaim, "Mon lac est le premier," (my lake is the first). For richness combined with grandeur, for softness around and impressiveness above, for a correspondence of contours on which the eye reposes with unwearied admiration, from the smiling aspect of fertility and cultivation at its lower extremity to the sublimity of a savage nature at its upper, no lake is superior to that of Geneva. Numberless almost are the distinguished men and women who have lived, labored, and died upon the shores of this fair lake; every spot has a tale to tell of genius, or records some history. In the calm retirement of Lausanne, Gibbon contemplated the decay of empires; Rousseau and Byron found inspiration on these shores; there is
Here is Chillon, with its great white wall sinking into the deep calm of the water, while its very stones echo memorable events, from the era of barbarism in 830, when Count Wala, who had held command of Charlemagne's forces, was incarcerated within the tower of this desolate rock during the reign of Louis le Debonnaire, to the imprisonment of the Salvation Army captain.
where Bonnivard, the prior of St. Victor and the great asserter of the independence of Geneva, was found when the castle was wrested from the Duke of Savoy by the Bernese.
Thomas Marshall Green, journalist and historian, was born near Danville, Kentucky, November 23, 1836, the son of Judge John Green, an early Kentucky jurist of repute, who died when his son was but two years old. Green was graduated from Centre College, Danville, in what is now known as the famous class of '55, which included several men afterwards distinguished. In 1856 Green joined the staff of the Frankfort Commonwealth, then a political journal of wide influence; and in the following year he became editor of that paper. He left the Commonwealth in 1860, to become editor of the Maysville Eagle, of which he made a pronounced success, its screams smacking not at all of the dignified days of its first editors, the Collinses, father and son. His Historic Families of Kentucky (Cincinnati, 1889), gave him a place among Kentucky historians, but the late Colonel John Mason Brown, of Louisville, gave to Green his greatest opportunity when he published his The Political Beginnings of Kentucky (Louisville, 1889). This work of Colonel Brown's was, in effect, an avowed vindication of the reputation of his grandfather, John Brown, first United States Senator from Kentucky, who, in the stormy days in which his lot had been cast, had been violently attacked for his alleged connection with the Spanish Conspiracy of Aaron Burr, which was charged in a controversy running through many years of violent disputation, to have been an attempt in connection with General James Wilkinson, Judges Sebastian, Wallace, and Innes of the Kentucky Court of Appeals and others to detach Kentucky from her allegiance to the United States, and annex her territory to the Spanish dominions of the South and South-west, through which the much-desired free navigation of the Mississippi would be assured. Colonel Brown was a brilliant man of unusual scholarly attainments and deeply read in American history. These qualities with his large legal training enabled him to present a strong case in the vindication of his grandfather's reputation. His arguments, theories, and proofs were illuminating, able, and to many minds most convincing, while they fell with small effect upon Green and many others who held the opposite view. For this reason Green wrote and published The Spanish Conspiracy (Cincinnati 1891), a wonderfully well informed and clever work, and the one upon which he takes his place among Western historians. Students who would be fully informed as to the many phases—the charges and matter relied upon for defense, pro and con, in this bitter controversy which marshalled Kentucky into two hostile camps, whose alignments were more or less maintained through many strenuous years—must study these two books. They present the last word on either side. Colonel Brown's untimely death, which occurred in 1890, some months before the appearance of Green's book, probably lost Kentucky a reply to the Maysville historian that would have added to the flood of light thrown on this early and vital crisis. The Spanish Conspiracy was supplemented and supported in its conclusions by Mr. Anderson C. Quisenberry's The Life and Times of Hon. Humphrey Marshall (Winchester, Kentucky, 1892). Thomas M. Green died at Danville, Kentucky, April 7, 1904.
Bibliography. Biographical Encyclopaedia of Kentucky (Cincinnati, 1878); Library of Southern Literature (Atlanta, 1910, v, xv).
THE CONSPIRATORS[24]
[From The Spanish Conspiracy (Cincinnati, 1891)]
The grief of the reader in learning from the Political Beginnings, that Humphrey Marshall was "violent, irreligious and profane," will be mollified by the assurance given in the same work that Harry Innes "was a sincerely religious man." It might with equal truth have been stated that Caleb Wallace, who had abandoned the Presbyterian pulpit to go into politics, kept up his church relations, and practiced his devotions with the utmost regularity. Sebastian also, who had cast off the gown of the Episcopal ministry in his pursuit of the "flesh pots of Egypt," continued, it is believed, the exercise of all religious observations, and, in the depth of his piety, deemed a treasonable overture entirely too good to be communicated to an infidel. While John Brown, who had absorbed faith as he sat under the very droppings of the sanctuary, it will be cheerfully conceded was the most devout of the four. On the other hand, John Wood, one of the editors of the Western World, whom they afterwards bought, was a reprobate; and young Joseph M. Street, whom they could neither bribe nor intimidate, and the attempt to assassinate whom proved a failure, was a sinner. It is distressing to think that, like Gavin Hamilton, the latter "drank, and swore, and played at cards." It may be that the wickedness of the editors of the Western World, and the contemplation of their own saintliness, justified in the eyes of the four Christian jurists and statesmen the several little stratagems they devised, and paid Littell for introducing into his "Narrative," in order to obtain the advantage of the wicked editors in the argument. The contrast of their characters made innocent those little mutilations by Innes of his own letter to Randolph! The same process of reasoning made laudable John Brown's suppression of his Muter letter, his assertion that it was identical with the "sliding letter," and his claim that the acceptance of Gardoqui's proposition would have been consistent with the alleged purpose to make some future application for the admission of Kentucky into the new Union! While the suppression of the resolution of Wallace and Wilkinson in the July convention, and the declaration that such a motion never was made, in order to prove the unhappy editors to be liars, became as praiseworthy as the spoiling of the Egyptians by the Israelites! The scene of those four distinguished gentlemen seated around a table, with a prayer-book in the center, planning the screen for themselves and the discomfiture of the editors, would be a subject worthy of the brush of a Hogarth.
Forceythe Willson, "the William Blake of Western letters," was born at Little Genesee, New York, April 10, 1837, the elder brother of the latest Republican governor of Kentucky, Augustus E. Willson. When Forceythe was nine years old, his family packed their household goods upon an "ark," or Kentucky flatboat, at Pittsburgh, and drifted down the Ohio river, landing at Maysville, Kentucky, where they resided for a year, and in which town the future governor of Kentucky was born. In 1847 the Willsons removed to Covington, Kentucky, and there Forceythe's education was begun. The family lived at Covington for six years, at the end of which time Forceythe entered Harvard University, but an attack of tuberculosis compelled him to leave without his degree. He returned to the West, making his home at New Albany, Indiana, a little town just across the Ohio river from Louisville. A year later Willson joined the editorial staff of the Louisville Journal, and together he and Prentice courted the muse and defended the cause of the Union. Willson's masterpiece, The Old Sergeant, was the "carrier's address" for January 1, 1863, printed anonymously on the front page of the Journal. The author's name was withheld until Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes pronounced it the best ballad the war had produced, when Willson was heralded as its author. The Old Sergeant recites an almost literally true story, and it is wonderfully well done. In the fall of 1863 Willson was married to the New Albany poet, Elizabeth C. Smith, and they removed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the future executive of the Commonwealth of Kentucky was a student in Harvard University. The Willsons purchased a home near Lowell's, and they were soon on friendly terms with all of the famous New England writers. In 1866 The Old Sergeant and Other Poems appeared at Boston, but it did not make an appeal to the general public. Forceythe Willson died at Alfred Centre, New York, February 2, 1867, but his body was brought back to Indiana, and buried on the banks of the Whitwater river. Willson believed it quite possible for the living to hold converse with the dead, and this, with other strange beliefs, entered largely into his poetry.
Bibliography. His authoritative biographer, Mr. John James Piatt, the Ohio poet, has written illuminatingly of this rare fellow, with his "almond-shaped eyes," as Dr. Holmes called them, and his Oriental look and manner, in The Atlantic Monthly (March, 1875); Lexington Leader (September 13, 1908). His brother, Hon. Augustus E. Willson, will shortly utter the final word concerning him and his work.
THE OLD SERGEANT
[From The Old Sergeant and Other Poems (Boston, 1867)]
William Campbell Preston Breckinridge, orator and journalist, was born at Baltimore, Maryland, August 28, 1837, the son of Rev. Robert J. Breckinridge (1800-1871), and an own cousin of John C. Breckinridge (1821-1875). He was graduated from Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, in the famous class of '55, after which he studied medicine for a year, when he abandoned it to enter the Louisville Law School. Before he was of age he was admitted to the Fayette County Bar, and he was a member of it when he died. In July, 1862, he entered the Confederate Army as a captain in John Hunt Morgan's command; and during the last two years of the war was colonel of the Ninth Kentucky Cavalry. The war over, Colonel Breckinridge returned to Lexington and became editor of The Observer and Reporter, which he relinquished a few years later in order to devote his entire attention to the law. In 1884 Colonel Breckinridge was elected to the lower House of Congress from the Ashland district, and he took his seat in December, 1885, which was the first session of the Forty-ninth Congress. One of his colleagues from Kentucky was the present Governor of the Commonwealth, James B. McCreary; another was John G. Carlise, who was chosen speaker over Thomas B. Reed of Maine. Colonel Breckinridge served ten years in the House, closing his career there in the Fifty-third Congress. In Washington he won a wide reputation as a public speaker, being commonly characterized as "the silver tongue orator from Kentucky." In 1894, after the most bitter congressional campaign of recent Kentucky history, he was defeated for re-election; and two years later as the "sound money" candidate he again met defeat, Evan E. Settle, who was also known in Congress as a very eloquent orator, and who hailed from the Kentucky county of "Sweet Owen," triumphing over him. Colonel Breckinridge was never again a candidate for public office. In 1897 he resumed his newspaper work, becoming chief editorial writer on The Lexington Herald, which paper was under the management of his son, Mr. Desha Breckinridge, the present editor. During the last eight years of his life Colonel Breckinridge achieved a new and fresh fame as a writer of large information upon State and national affairs. Simplicity was the goal toward which he seemed to strive in his discussions of great and small questions. His articles upon the Goebel tragedy were really State papers of importance. Upon more than one occasion his editorial utterances were wired to a New York paper, appearing simultaneously in that paper and in his own. He declined several offers to become editor of metropolitan newspapers. While at the present time Colonel Breckinridge is remembered by the great common people as an orator of unsurpassed gifts, and while a great memorial mass of legends have grown about his name, it is as a writer of real ability, who had all the requisites and inclinations of a man of letters save one of the chief essentials: leisure. When his speeches and writings are collected and his biography written his true position in the literature of Kentucky will be more clearly and generally appreciated than it now is. Colonel Breckinridge died at Lexington, Kentucky, November 19, 1904.
Bibliography. The eulogy of John Rowan Allen is the finest summing up of Colonel Breckinridge's life and labors (Lexington Leader, November 23, 1904); Kentucky Eloquence, edited by Bennett H. Young (Louisville, Kentucky, 1907). His papers, together with those of his grandfather and father, are now in possession of the Library of Congress.
"IS NOT THIS THE CARPENTER'S SON?"
[From The Lexington Herald (Christmas Day, 1899)]
"And they told him that Jesus of Nazareth passeth by." And this has been the universal truth since those days—the one unchangeable, pregnant, vital truth of development, of progress, of civilization, of happiness, of freedom, of charity. The perpetual presence, the ceaseless personal influence, the potent force of His continual association alone renders human history intelligible or makes possible the solution of any grave problem which man meets in his upward march to better life and more wholesome conditions. And to-day the accepted anniversary of the birth of the "carpenter's son" is the one day whose celebration is in all civilized nations, among all independent people and in all learned tongues. The world has not yet accepted Him; there are nations very large in numbers, very old in histories, very devout in their accepted religions, which have not accepted His claim to be divine, nor bowed to the reign of His supreme authority. And the contrast between such nations and those who have accepted His claim and modeled their laws upon His teachings form the profoundest reason for the verity of that claim and the beneficence of those teachings.
Millions to-day will assemble themselves in their accustomed houses of worship, and with songs and instruments of music, with garlands and wreaths, with glad countenances and uplifted hearts, render adoration to the carpenter's son of Nazareth; adoration to the lowly Jew who was born in a manger and died upon a cross. Many millions will not attend worship, but still render unconscious testimony to the wondrous power which He has exercised through the centuries in the glad happiness which springs from conditions which are only possible under His teachings and by the might of His perpetual presence. They will not know that "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by," but the day is full of joy, the homes are radiant with happiness, the cheer is jovial and the laughter jocund, the eye brightens under the glances of loved ones—because He has passed by and scattered love and charity with profuse prodigality along the pathway He trod.
He has walked through the gay hearts of little children, and joy has sprung up as wild flowers where His footsteps fell; He has lingered at the mother's bedside and ineffable love has filled the heart of her who felt His gentle presence. In carpenter shops like unto that in which He toiled for thirty years, in humble homes, in the counting rooms of bankers, in the offices of lawyers and doctors, in the charitable institutions which are memorials of His teachings, He has passed by; those within may not have been conscious thereof; they were possibly too absorbed to feel the sweet and pervading fragrance of the omnipotent force which He always exerts; yet over them and their thoughts He did exert that irresistible power; and to-day the world is better, sweeter, more joyful, more loving, because of Him.
It is in its secular aspect that we venture to submit these thoughts; it is His transforming power secularly to which we call attention this sweet Christmas morning. "Christ the Lord Has Risen," but it is Jesus the man—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of the carpenter, the new teacher of universal brotherhood, the man who went about doing good; the obscure Jew who brought the new and nobler era of charity and forgiveness and love into actual existence that The Herald, a mere secular paper, desires to hold up.
And peculiarly to that aspect of His life that was social; the friend of Lazarus; the diner at the table of Zaccheus; the pleased and kindly guest at the wedding of Cana; the man who leaned His head on the breast of His friend, the simple gentleman who took little children in His arms and loved them; the obedient son, the loyal friend, the forbearing associate, the forgiving master, the tender healer of disease, the loving man who was touched with a sense of all our infirmities.
To-day with jollity let us turn the water of our common lives into the wine of sweet domestic happiness; let us take the children of misfortune to our breast; let us be loyal to our weaker friends; let us share our fullness with our brethren who are lean in this world's goods, and, shedding smiles and kind words, and pleasant phrases through the day, it may be that some stricken heart made glad may say: "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by."
General Basil Wilson Duke, historian of Morgan's men, was born near Georgetown, Kentucky, May 28, 1838. He was educated at Georgetown and Centre Colleges, after which he studied law at Transylvania University. He was admitted to the bar, in 1858, and entered upon the practice at St. Louis. In 1861 he was a member of the Kentucky legislature; and in June of that year he married the sister of John Hunt Morgan and enlisted in Morgan's command. Upon Morgan's death, in 1864, General Duke succeeded him as leader of the band. After the war he settled at Louisville, Kentucky, as a lawyer, and that city is his home today. From 1875 to 1880 General Duke was commonwealth's attorney for the Fifth Judicial District; and since 1895 he has been a commissioner of Shiloh Military Park. His Morgan's Cavalry (Cincinnati, 1867; New York, 1906), is the authoritative biography of the noted partisan leader and history of his intrepid band. General Duke was one of the editors of The Southern Bivouac, a Louisville magazine, from 1885 to 1887. His History of the Bank of Kentucky (Louisville, 1895), filled a gap in Kentucky history; and his Reminiscences (New York, 1911), was a delightful volume of enormous proportions.
Bibliography. Lawyers and Lawmakers of Kentucky (Chicago, 1897); The Bookman (December, 1907).
MORGAN, THE MAN
[From Morgan's Cavalry (Cincinnati, 1867)]
General Morgan had more of those personal qualities which make a man's friends devoted to him than any one I have ever known. He was himself very warm and constant in the friendships which he formed. It seemed impossible for him to do enough for those to whom he was attached, or to ever give them up. His manner, when he wished, prepossessed every one in his favor. He was generally more courteous and attentive to his inferiors than to his equals and superiors. This may have proceeded in a great measure from his jealousy of dictation and impatience of restraint, but was the result also of warm and generous feeling. His greatest faults arose out of his kindness and easiness of disposition, which rendered it impossible for him to say or do unpleasant things, unless when under the influence of strong prejudice or resentment. This temperament made him a too lax disciplinarian, and caused him to be frequently imposed upon. He was exceedingly and unfeignedly modest. For a long time he sought, in every way, to avoid the applause and ovations which met him everywhere in the South, and he never learned to keep a bold countenance when receiving them.
His personal appearance and carriage were striking and graceful. His features were eminently handsome and adapted to the most pleasing expressions. His eyes were small, of a grayish blue color, and their glances keen and thoughtful. His figure on foot or on horseback was superb. He was exactly six feet in height, and although not at all corpulent, weighed one hundred and eighty-five pounds. His form was perfect and the rarest combination of strength, activity, and grace. His constitution seemed impervious to the effects of privation and exposure, and it was scarcely possible to perceive that he suffered from fatigue or lack of sleep.
Men are not often born who can wield such an influence as he exerted, apparently without an effort; who can so win men's hearts and stir their blood. He will, at least, be remembered until the Western cavalrymen and their children have all died. The bold riders who lived in the border-land, whose every acre he made historic, will leave many a story of his audacity and wily skill.
Henry Watterson, the foremost Kentucky journalist, and one of the most widely known newspaper men in the United States, was born at Washington, D. C., February 16, 1840. This accident of birth was due to the fact that his father, Harvey McGee Watterson, with his wife, was in Washington as a member of the lower house of Congress from his native state, Tennessee. In consequence of defective vision, Henry Watterson was educated by private tutors; but he did attend the Episcopal School at Philadelphia for a short time. At the age of eighteen years he became a reporter on the Washington States; but, in 1861, he returned to Nashville, Tennessee, to edit the Republican Banner. Watterson was a staff officer in the Confederate Army, and in 1864 chief of scouts for General Joseph E. Johnston, but throughout the war he was also editing a newspaper. After the war he married and revived the Banner, which he edited for about two years, when he removed to Louisville, Kentucky, and succeeded George D. Prentice as editor of the Journal. In the following year Watterson, with Walter N. Haldeman, consolidated the Journal, Courier, and Daily Democrat to form The Courier-Journal. The first issue of this paper appeared November 8, 1868, and Colonel Watterson has been its editor ever since. He has made it the greatest newspaper in Kentucky, if not in the South or West, and one of the best known papers printed in the English language. His editorials are unequalled by any other writer in America, either from the point of thought or construction; and his style is always more interesting than his substance. Colonel Watterson has held but one public office, having been a member of the Forty-fourth Congress, in 1876, and the personal friend and most ardent supporter of Samuel J. Tilden in the infamous Hayes-Tilden controversy of that year. Colonel Watterson has been a delegate-at-large from Kentucky in many Democratic presidential conventions, in all of which bodies he has been a conspicuous figure. He is famous as a journalist, orator, and author. His eulogy upon Abraham Lincoln has been listened to in almost every state in the Union, and it is his best known effort in oratory. Though now past his three score years and ten, Colonel Watterson is as vigorous and vindictive as ever in the handling of public questions and of his legion of enemies, as the country witnessed in the presidential campaign of 1912. He edited Oddities of Southern Life and Character (Boston, 1882); and he has written The History of the Spanish-American War (Louisville, 1898); The Compromises of Life: Lectures and Addresses (New York, 1902), containing his ablest speeches delivered upon many occasions; and Old London Town (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1911), a group of his European letters to The Courier-Journal, edited by Joseph Fort Newton. Colonel Watterson has an attractive country home near Louisville, "Mansfield," but in recent years his winters have been spent at Naples-on-the-Gulf, in Florida, and his summers in "grooming presidential candidates!"
Bibliography. The Bookman (February, 1904); Harper's Weekly (November 12, 1904); The Booklovers Magazine (March, 1905).
OLD LONDON TOWN[26]
[From Old London Town, and Other Travel Sketches (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1910)]
London, less than any of the great capitals of the world—even less than Berlin—has changed its aspects in the last four decades of alteration and development. During the Second Empire, and under the wizard hand of Baron Hauseman, a new Paris sprang into existence. We know what has happened in New York and Chicago. But London, except the Thames Embankment and the opening of a street here and there betwixt the City and the West End—the mid-London of Soho and the Strand—is very much the London I became acquainted with nearly forty years ago. To be sure many of the ancient landmarks, such as Temple Bar, the Cock and the Cheshire Cheese, have gone to the ash heap of the forgotten, whilst some imposing hostelries have risen in the region about Trafalgar Square; but, in the main, the biggest village of Christendom has lost none of its familiar earmarks, so that the exile set down anywhere from Charing Cross and Picadilly Circus to the bustling region of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, blindfold, would, the instant the bandage were removed from his eyes, exclaim, "It is London!"
Yes, it is London; the same old London; the same old cries in the street; the same old whitey-brown atmosphere; even the same old Italian organ-grinders, the tunes merely a trifle varied. Nor yet without its charm, albeit to me of a rather ghostly, reminiscental sort. I came here in 1866, with a young wife and a roll of ambitious manuscript, found work to do and a publisher, lived for a time in the clouds of two worlds, that of Bohemia, of which the Savage Club was headquarters, and that of the New Apocalypse of Science which eddied about the School of Mines in Jermyn Street and the Fortnightly Review, then presided over by George Henry Lewes, my nearest friend and sponsor the late Professor Huxley. I alternated my days and nights between a somewhat familiar intimacy with Spencer and Tyndall and a wholly familiar intimacy with Tom Robertson and Andrew Halliday. Artemus Ward was in London and it was to him that I owed these later associations. Sir Henry Irving had not made his mark. Sir Charles Wyndham was still in America. There were Keenes and Kembles yet upon the stage. Charles Matthews ruled the roost of Comedy. George Eliot was in the glory of her powers and her popularity. Thackeray was gone, but Charles Dickens lived and wrote. Bulwer-Lytton lived and wrote. Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade vied with one another for current favor. Modern Frenchification had invaded neither the restaurants nor the music halls. Evans's Coffee House (Pendennis core of Harmony) prevailed after midnight in Covent Garden Market. In short, the solidarities of Old England, along with its roast, succulent, abundant and intact.
To me London was Mecca. The look of it, the very smell of it, was inspiration. Incidentally—I don't mind saying—there were some cakes and ale. The nights were jolly enough down in the Adelphi, where the barbarians of the Savage Club held high revel, and George Augustus Sala was Primate, and Edmund Yates and Tom Robertson were High Priests. Temple Bar blocked the passage from Belgravia to the Bank of England, and there was no Holborn Viaduct nor Victorian Embankment.
Aye, long ago! How far away it seems, and how queer! To me it was the London of story-books; of Whittington and his cat and Goody Two-Shoes and the Canterbury Shades; of Otway and Marlowe and Chatterton; of Nell Gwynne and Dick Steele and poor Goldsmith; of all that was bizarre and fanciful in history, that was strange and romantic in legend; and not the London of the Tower, the Museum and Westminster Abbey; not the London of Cremorne Gardens, newly opened, nor the Argyle Rooms, which should have been burned to the ground before they were opened at all.
Since then I have been in and out of London many times. I have been amused here and bored here; but give me back my old fool's paradise and I shall care for naught else.
One may doubt which holds him closest, the London of History or the London of Fiction, or that London which is a mingling of both, and may be called simply the London of Literature, in which Oliver Goldsmith carouses with Tom Jones, and Harry Fielding discusses philosophy with the Vicar of Wakefield, where Nicholas Nickleby makes so bold as to present himself to Mr. William Makepeace Thackeray and to ask his intercession in favor of a poor artist, the son of a hairdresser of the name of Turner in Maiden Lane, and even where "Boz," as he passes through Longacre, is tripped up by the Artful Dodger, and would perchance fall upon the siding if not caught in the friendly arms of Sir Richard Steele on his way to pay a call upon the once famous beauty, the Lady Beatrix Esmond.
But yesterday I strolled into Mitre Court, and threading my way through the labyrinth of those dingy old law chambers known as the Middle and Inner Temple, found myself in the little graveyard of the Temple Church and by the side of the grave of Oliver Goldsmith. Though less than a stone's throw from Fleet Street and the Strand, the place is quiet enough, only a faint hum of wheels penetrating the cool precincts and gloomy walls. There, beneath three oblong slabs, put together like an outer stone coffin, lies the most richly endowed of all the vagabonds, with the simple but sufficient legend: