Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Haunted London. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![I HAUNTED LONDON. morning, that rcquii'ed some consideration, and I found it almost impossible to work a bit; and'-\Tf;beu I told the doctor, he said he vyas delighted to hOi^ it, for that he doesn’t want any of ud to- b,c writin^t or studying^hjy;er“—\ .1-)^ ^ ^ continuod.] j 24 . '' f l\ J' the'^OlS-jiirm’^ or HAUNTED L^ I.—ukcoln’s inn Lincoln’s Inn, that is to say, . mansion of the Earls of Lincoln (1312) on its gi-imy Chancery Lane side, is indeed, as Leigh Hunt well expressed it, “ saturated with London smoke.” That long row of black opaque windows, that even in hot bright June, sunshine never seems to visit; those mud-splashed spiders’ nests of opaque glass, piled up with heaps of dead men’s briefs, that are tied with red tape aud spiced with dust black as pepper; can scarcely, by the liveliest imagination, be recog- nised as lighting the chambers where Cromwell spent his wild j’outh, afterwards to bo so weepingly repented of; where Dr. Donne wi’ote quaint crabbed poetry; where the wise Lord Mansfield sipped his tea; aud where, at the mature age of twenty. Sir Thomas More donned a hair shirt, to help him to meditate on law and philosophy, with that massy head one day to be hdd up in the bloody grip of an executioner. It is healtuy, in walking London streets, to fly the mind, as if it was a hawk, back at old times; it removes us from the selfishness of the present; it reads all our dreams and hopes a sharp sound lesson ol the mutability of things, aud teaches us what a great kaleidoscope this city (nay, the world itself) is in the hands of Time—that mighty conjuror, upon whose magic chess-board we men are but as the pawns of red and white. It gives, too—this putting on, now and then, antiquarian spectacles—a charm to our walks, lift- ing oQ‘ London roofs for us, as a carver lifts up the lid of a pie, and showing us under each, little fairy worlds of history and poetry; for behind eveiy stucco shop-front even in this Babel Fleet Street ai-e hid tragedies and comedies, more wonderful than playwright or novelist ever -wrote: for fic- tion after all, is at the best but a poor apeiw of human life. As I alk down Chancery Lane, observing this smoke-black wall of the legal fortress, so squalid in appearance, so splendid in memories, I can scarcely, though ^ I have read it so often, imagine that this la-wyers inn was, hundreds of years ago, a solemn monastery of the Blac/c Briars, till they removed near the bridge that stiU bears them name. Their cloisters faced on the Holborn side the palace of the Bishop of Chichester, buUt in Henry iii’s reign. When the monkish rooks flew, the Earl of Lincoln, by Edward i, his master’s leave, built his house or mn here; and then, in Henry vii’s time, the Bishop of Chichester, reserving lodgings to himself, leased the iim to students of law, aud Sir Thomas Lovek treasui-er of the royal household to “ Earry of Eichmond,” built the present pile out of the materials of the bishop’s palace, the Eaii of Lin- coln's house, and what remained of the old monas- tery ; so our new world goes on using up its old materials; our new books spring up like fungi fi’om our old books; and the fossil bones of extinct ^nimals go to pave our very London streets. I But let us pass under the Tudor brick arch, that Sii- Thomas Lovel must have smiled at when ij( was completed, and wind through to meet our ,shadow-friends in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, stopping only for a moment to wonder where the old garden wall “ next to Chancery Lane” stood, at which that bitter-faced satirist, Ben Jonson, Shaksperc’s friend, once worked with a diamond-shaped steel trowel in his hand, and Homer in his pocket. Now we breathe freer; we are past the chapel, and all the chambers with doorways lettered like the backs of books, and are in the fields, that in Charles I’s time, Inigo Jones, the great Welsh architect, Ben Jonson’s sworn enemy, laid out just as they arc now, makiug, with clever pedantry, the great inclosure the exact size of the base of the largest pyramid of Egypt. Gigantic puzzle! I can see it now, far away as when Moses saw it, braving the sun and cleaving the clouds. It may make the hard man laugh when I confess, without shame, that there is not a sooty lilac bush, nor a black wiry plane tree, in those gardens that the great Lord Bacon helped Jones to lay out, that I do not love, and indeed regard as a sort of poor relation. They gave me, a London-bred boy, my first ideas of country delights; there I first saw a real live butterfly; there I first leaped for joy, to see the buds break out; and there I first felt sad to see the beautiful green leaves, that spread out like birds’ wings, and move and breathe and all but speak, turn to the death-yellow of autumn. But I have greater people to talk about, and must forget myself. Inigo Jones’s houses arc in Arch Eow, on the west side of the square. Here, in the Georgian times, lived all the stars of fashion, for this was then a sort of Belgrave Square to the rakes in wigs, and the card-playing ladies in hoops and sacques. The Dukes of Ancaster, Horace Walpole, the -vvitty flippant memoir writer’s friends, lived on this side, in a house now sliced into cham- bers ; where, I am told, high up, once mused oui* great poet, Tennyson. His room is a cheery little room, Venetianized by a heavy stone balustrade facing the window. There is a certain look of faded grandeur, even now, about this house, that com- mands respect; the square black-red brick pillars at the gateway stiU forlornly balance their stone globes, as if they were disconsolate giant jugglers, doomed, without an audience, to go through their eternal performance; and in blue fog evenings I should not be astonished to see sweep into that grass-grown court-yard a huge gilded coach, the panels blazing with mythological subjects, but the coachman a skeleton, driving the ghost of a duke home from a Walpole “ drum.” Not far from this haunted house come three mansions, once united into one, and called Powis House. When Popish James ii fled to Prance, the Marquis of Powis left this new-built house, and fled too; the Lord Keeper had it then, and next the Prime Minister of George ii—that I’idiculous](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22474560_0003.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
