do not mean living over again our own days; for though, if we could "pick and choose," there are sundry portions of our lives we might desire to repeat, yet, beginning from the beginning, taking the bad and the good "straight on," there can be few, men or women, who would willingly pass again through the whole of a gone-by career. And this, properly considered, is one of our greatest blessings; stifling much of vain regret, and teaching us to "look forward" to the future. We have always had, if we may so call it, a domestic rambling propensity; a desire to see "dwellings," not so much for their pictorial as their, so to say, personal celebrity: and sometimes, as on our visit to Barley Wood, this longing comes upon us at the wrong season, when a cheerful fire at "home" would be a meet companion. It is now six years ago—six years, last month—that, pacing along Pall Mall, we paused, and turned to the left hand corner of St. James's Square, full of painful and un-English memories of the Asiatic court of the second Charles; the sovereign who had endured adversity without discovering that "sweet are its uses;" who had "suffered tribulation" without "learning mercy"—the king who makes us doubt if, as a people, we have any claim to what is called "national character"—for the change that came over England, within a few brief years, from gloomy fanaticism to reckless license, is one of the marvels that give to history the aspect of romance. We had been walking round Whitehall,2 recalling the change that had swept away nearly all relics of the past in that quarter, and strolled so far out of our home-ward path to look at the house in Pall Mall (recently removed from its place) which tradition says was the dwelling of Nell Gwynne, besides her apartment at Whitehall, to which she was entitled by virtue of her office as lady of the bed-chamber to a most outraged queen. One of our friends remembers supping in the back room on the ground-floor of that very house, the said room being called "the Mirror Chamber," because the walls were panelled with looking-glass3. There are others who affirm that Nelly lodged at the opposite side of Pall Mall, because Evelyn gossips of her leaning from her window, "talking to the king," who was lounging in St. James's Park, thereby wounding the propriety of many, who think vice only vice when it becomes notorious. Evelyn was always sadly perplexed by his faithful and high devotion to Charles, the king, and his abhorrence of the vices of Charles, the man; while Pepys jogged on, sometimes in the royal seraglio, sometimes at church, sometimes with my Lady Castlemaine, sometimes with "Knip" at the "king's house," seeing, admiring, and repeating—his morality held in abeyance; and yet always, even to the kissing of "Mistress Nelly," "a sweet pretty soul," companioned by his wife. If Pepys was a curiosity, what must Madame Pepys have been!4 What must the "court set" of those days have been, when we are absolutely refreshed by turning from them to the uneducated but frank-hearted and generous woman,—tainted as she is to all history by the worse than imperfections arising out of her position, yet redeemed in a degree, by virtues, which, in that profligate court, were entirely her own!
WHITEHALL.
The scene in St. James's Park to which Evelyn refers, was an index to the age5.
Blessed as we are in the knowledge that nowhere in England are the domestic virtues better cultivated or more truly flourishing than in our own pure and high-souled court, we are almost inclined to treat as a mythological fable, the history of Whitehall during the reign of Charles the Second. No one trait of the father's better nature redeems that of the son. His life was indeed
"a sad epicure's dream,"
and worse. He was not worthy even of the earnest devotion which the poor orange-girl, of all his favorites, alone manifested to the last.
Poor Nell! the sympathy which every right-thinking woman feels it a Christian duty to give to her and her class, far from extenuating vice, is only a call upon the virtuous to be more virtuous, and to the pure to be more pure. No one would plunge into crime, merely for the sake of being redeemed therefrom; no one take the sin, who looked first at the shame, hideous and enduring as it must be—however overshadowed by the broad wings of mercy; the burn of the brand can never be effaced, however skilfully healed. And when the wit, the loveliness, the generosity, the fidelity of "Madame Ellen," when the memory of the well-spent evening of her checkered life, and the allowance we make for the early impressions of a young creature, called upon to sing her first songs in a tavern, and sell oranges in the depraved and depraving saloon of "the King's House;"—when all these aids are exerted to excite our sympathy, we only accord the sentiment of pity to "poor Nell Gwynne!"
While looking at the house said to have been inhabited by this "femme d'esprit par la grace de Dieu!" we vowed a pilgrimage to Sandford Manor House, at Sandy End, Fulham,—to the dwelling where there is no doubt she spent many summer months. Near as it is to our own, we were doubtful of the way, and determined to inquire of our opposite neighbor, who keeps the old Brompton tollbar.
"Sandford Manor House," repeated he, "I never heard tell of such a place in these parts. Whereabouts is it?"
"Exactly what we want to know. It is a very old dilapidated house, by the side of a little stream that runs into the Thames somewhere by Old Chelsea. I think you must have heard of it. It was once inhabited by the famous Nell Gwynne." I might almost as well have talked Hebrew to our neighbor, who seemed born to lay in wait for market-carts, and pounce upon them for toll.
SANDFORD MANOR HOUSE.
"Old house! Nell Gwynne!" he again repeated, and something like an expression of life and interest moved his features while he added—"It's the Nell Gwynne public-house you're after, I'm thinking; that was in Chelsea; but whether it's there now or not, is more than I can tell."
"No, no," we answered, perhaps, sharply, "it is the house she lived in we want to see—Sandford Manor House."
"Perhaps it's the madhouse," he suggested. We walked on. "Please," said a little rosy-faced boy, "if you want to find out any thing about old houses, Hill, the rat-catcher, knows them all, as he hunts up the rats and sparrows about; and you have only to go down Thistle Grove, into the Fulham road—straight on. His is a low house, ma'am—his name in the window—you can't pass it, for the birds and white mice."
And is there no one left, we thought, to tell where the witty, light-hearted, true-hearted Nelly lived—she who was the friend of Dryden and Lee, the favorite of Lord Buckhurst, the rival of the Duchess of Cleveland, the protector of the soldiers of England—the one unselfish friend of the selfish Charles? Is there no one in a district that once echoed with the praise of her charities—no one to tell where she resided, but Hill, the old rat-catcher? We proceeded through the prettily-built, but gangrened-looking, cottages located in Thistle Grove, once called Brompton Heath, (or Marsh, we forget which,) until the sounds of traffic reminded us that we were in the Fulham road. Presently the sharp voice of a starling, just above us, attracted our attention.
"Poor Tom!" said the bird—"Tom!—poor Tom!"
The old rat-catcher invited us to enter. He is a man of powerful frame, with a massive head, fringed round with an abundance of gray hair, with deep well-set eyes, and a quiet smile. Two sharp, bitter-looking, wiry-haired terriers began smelling, casting their sly eyes upwards, to see if we feared them or were friendly to their advances, and, after a moment or two, seemed sufficiently satisfied with the scrutiny to warrant their wagging their short stumpy tails in rude welcome. The room was hung round with cages of the songbirds of England—some content with their captivity, others restless, and passing to and fro in front of the wires, eager for escape. Strong inclosures, containing both rats and ferrets, were ranged along the sides of the small room; the latter, long, yellow, pink-eyed, and pink-nosed creatures, lithe as a willow wand, courting notice; while the rats, on the contrary, moved their whiskers in defiance, and, with bright, black, determined eyes, sat lumped up in the distant corners of their dens, ready 'to die game,' if die they must. Gay-colored finches, the gold and the green, graced the window in little brown bob cages; while mice of all colors, from the burnt sienna-colored dormouse, who was more than half asleep within the skin of an apple which it had scooped out, to the matronly white mouse, who was sitting composedly