fancy that such a soul had but mistaken its way while wandering from the abodes of the gods, and brought with it to the earth all the wisdom and poetry which it had taken an immortality to gather; that when he returned to his native home, the gates of heaven closed not suddenly enough upon him to shut out the undying echoes of his golden utterance; but that for ever the winds of heaven were chartered to repeat them—to blow them abroad into every corner of the earth—nor cease their mission until the language he spoke shall be uttered by “every nation, kindred, and tongue.” Such a deed as this alone proves his mortality; for the creations of his genius carry him as far away from the common standard of men as heaven is from earth.
What records have we here of old families long since passed away!—their very names forgotten in the places where they once enjoyed
“A little rule—a little sway,
A sunbeam on a winter’s day,
Between the cradle and the grave.”—Dyer.
Perhaps the last of the race perished a pauper in some obscure poorhouse; it may be, the one which his ancestors founded a century or two ago.
Another visits the Will-Office, who gained information of the death of some near and wealthy relative by chance—perhaps through the scrap of an old newspaper which formed the wrapper of the pennyworth of butter or cheese purchased at the little huckster’s shop at the corner of the filthy court in which for years the poor family have resided—spots in which misery clings to misery for companionship. Letter after letter had they written, but received no answer; no one would take the trouble to reply. Then they sank lower and lower, and removed from place to place, until, at last, one single room in an undrained and breathless alley held all their cares and all their heart-aches; and there they tried to forget their wealthy relatives—to bury the remembrance of what they once were.
Meantime, he who had long been dead had remembered them on his deathbed; letters had been written and advertisements had appeared, announcing “something to their advantage,” but they had fallen amongst the very poor, who, though living in the heart of London, concerned not themselves with matters foreign to their own wretched neighbourhood, unless it were some execution or low spectacle, suited to their depraved tastes. Poverty had long ago prostrated all their finer feelings. Even such as these have we seen enter the doors of the Prerogative Court, after they had with difficulty raised the shilling which they were compelled to pay before searching for the will, and come out exultingly the possessors of thousands.
A strange place is that Prerogative Court, a fine picture of the great out-of-door world; for there Hope and Despair stand sentinels at the doors, and the living seem to jostle the dead in their eager hurry to hunt after what those in the grave have left them. There is a smell as of death about the place, as if grey old departed spirits lurked in the musty folios, and had scattered their ashes amid the yellow and unearthly-looking parchments, which rise up again in clouds of dust, while you turn over the mouldy and crackling leaves, making you sneeze again, while a hundred old echoes take up the sound, until every volume seems to shake and laugh and mock you, as if the grim old dead found it a rare spot to make merry in—to “mop and mow,” and play off a thousand devilish antics upon the living. That court is the great mart of merriment and misery, and its open doors too often lead to madness; groaning and moaning, when they open or shut, as if the spirits within wailed over those who come in search of wealth, to return disappointed. Beauty, Virtue, and Innocence also enter there, preceded by Pity; while Hope, with downcast eyes, leads them gently by the hand—her smile subdued, and her sweet countenance sorrowful. But these are angel visitants, who are compelled to appear in that court—who come in tears, and, when their duty is done, pass away for ever. There is a sound of sighs within those walls—a smell of green, stagnant tears: if you listen, you seem to hear the dead rustling among the old parchments: they move like black-beetles, and murmur to one another in an old Saxon language. Wickedness and Wrong have also their lurking-places there—where they lie concealed, and laugh at Right and Justice amid a pile of black-lettered laws, beneath which you find injured Poverty mourning unpitied. The grim judge, who has sat here for hundreds of years, is deaf and blind: he acts but for the dead—the living he can neither hear nor see—but ever sits with his elbow resting on a pile of musty volumes, mute as a marble image. It is a place filled with solemn associations—the ante-room of Life-in-Death.
Knowing fellows are the porters who hang about this neighbourhood; you can tell that they have not plied there for years without picking up “a thing or two;” they appear almost as “ ’cute” as the learned proctors themselves; and should you find yourself the possessor of a fat legacy, and be so ignorant as to apply to these white-aproned messengers as to the best way of getting it at once, they will undertake to introduce you to a gentleman, who, from what you hear, you almost believe to be so clever that he could whip your name into a will if he chose, and obtain for you a fortune, if even you had no legal claim to a single shilling. “God bless you, sir, we knows plenty of people what’s got thousands as never expected to have a blessed mag whatsomdever.” And green countrymen follow these plump images of Hope, and treat them to whatever they please to take.
Besides the Prerogative Will-Office, Doctors’ Commons contains the Court of Arches, a name well known to all the readers of newspapers; the Court of Faculties and Dispensation, having a good deal to do with marriage-licenses, and many other less lawful matters; the Consistory Court of the Bishop of London, and the High Court of Admiralty, so that “all is fish” which falls into the net of these courts—from a lady running away from her husband, to one ship running down another. A captive of Cupid’s or a capture in war, is all the same to these able practitioners, where either the owner or the husband of the Nancy Dawson may find redress—for either ship or spouse come alike to advocate or proctor.
Here we have, also, the Heralds’ College, well worthy of notice, as it contains many curious rolls and valuable manuscripts.
At the bottom of Bennet’s-hill stood Paul’s-wharf—a famous landing-place before the Great Fire; the church still bears the name of St. Bennet, Paul’s-wharf. Here Knightrider-street and Carter-lane extend in the line of the river. Carter-lane has become classic ground, through one Richard Quyney having directed a letter from the Bell Inn, which formerly stood there, to Shakspeare. Little did Quyney dream how much the handwriting of the poet he was then addressing would one day be valued—of the hundreds of pilgrims who would visit the adjoining Court to see the will of Shakspeare. The society which bears his name are doing “good service” by hunting up and publishing such records as these, for they throw a charm around the old poetical neighbourhood of Blackfriars Bridge, and give to such places as Carter-lane an interest which they never before possessed;
“For there is link’d unto a poet’s name
A spell that can command the voice of fame.”
Knightrider-street, Stowe tells us, derived its name from the knights of old riding through it on their way from the Tower to Smithfield to hold their jousts and tournaments. It was in Knightrider-street that the mace was found which was stolen from the Lord Chancellor’s closet, in Great Queen-street, on Tuesday night, February 6th, 1676. A small quarto pamphlet, of eight pages, published in 1676, bears the following title:—“A perfect Narrative of the Apprehension, Trial, and Confession of the five several persons who were confederates in stealing the Mace and the two Privy Purses from the Lord High Chancellor of England, as it was attested at the Sessions held at Justice Hall, in the Old Bailey, the seventh and eighth of March, anno 1676.” The following extract is curious, as a picture of the old London thieves, and also of the lodging-house keepers, many of whom still inherit the gift of “opening the lock with a knife,” or any thing that first comes to hand:—“The manner of their apprehension was thus: some of the head of the gang had taken a lodging in Knightrider-street, near Doctors’ Commons, and there, in a closet, they had lodged the mace and purses. The woman’s daughter of the house going up in their absence to make the bed, saw some silver spangles, or some odd ends of silver, scattered about the chamber, which she with no small diligence picked up, not knowing from whence such riches should proceed. In this admiration she paused awhile, and it was not long before her fancy led her, like the rest of her sex, to pry into and search