Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London — Reading Companion

Milton had his birth there.

Dr. Donne, the son of a London merchant, was also born within a stone's throw of Cheapside; and his disciple, Cowley, came into the world in Fleet Street, at the corner of Chancery Lane. But Cowley was a renegade; he acquired an unnatural preference for the country, and not only held that "God the first garden made, and the first city Cain," but ended a poem in praise of nature and a quiet life with--

"Methinks I see The monster London laugh at me; I should at thee too, foolish city, If it were fit to laugh at misery; But thy estate I pity. Let but thy wicked men from out thee go, And all the fools that crowd thee so, Even thou, who dost thy millions boast, A village less than Islington wilt grow, A solitude almost."

The daintiest of our lyrists, Herrick, was born over his father's shop in Cheapside, and you may take it he was only playing with poetical fancies when, in some lines to his friend Endymion Porter, he praised the country with its "nut-brown mirth and russet wit," and again when, in a set of verses on "The Country Life," he assured his brother he was "thrice and above blest," because he could--

"Leave the city, for exchange, to see The country's sweet simplicity."

If you want to find him in earnest, turn to that enraptured outburst of his on "His Return to London"--

"Ravished in spirit I come, nay more I fly To thee, blessed place of my nativity!... O place! O people! manners framed to please All nations, customs, kindreds, languages! I am a free-born Roman; suffer then That I amongst you live a citizen. London my home is, though by hard fate sent Into a long and irksome banishment; Yet since called back, henceforward let me be, O native country! repossessed by thee; For rather than I'll to the West return, I'll beg of thee first here to have mine urn."

There speaks the true Cockney; he would sooner be dead in London than alive in the West of England. Even Lamb's love of London was scarcely greater than that.

It was fitting that Pope, essentially a town poet, should be born in Lombard Street. In the next thoroughfare, Cornhill, Gray was born; and, son of a butcher, Defoe began life in the parish of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. Shakespeare was an alien, but Bacon was born at York House, in the Strand; which, to my thinking, is the strongest argument in favour of the theory that he wrote the plays. Churchill was born at Vine Street, Westminster; Keats in Moorfields; and, staunchest and one of the most incorrigible Londoners of them all, Charles Lamb in Crown Office Row, Temple. He refers, in one of his essays, to Hare Court, in the Temple, and says: "It was a gloomy, churchyard-like court, with three trees and a pump in it. I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old." The pump is no longer there, only one half of Hare Court remains as it was in Lamb's day, and Crown Office Row has been rebuilt. His homes in Mitre Court Buildings and Inner Temple Lane have vanished also; but the Temple is still rich in reminiscences of him. Paper Buildings, King's Bench Walk, Harcourt Buildings, the fountain near Garden Court, the old Elizabethan Hall, in which tradition says Shakespeare read one of his plays to Queen Elizabeth--these and the church, the gardens, the winding lanes and quaint byways of the Temple, made up, as he said, his earliest recollections. "I repeat to this day," he writes, "no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot--

'There when they came whereas those bricky towers The which on Themmes broad aged back doth ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, There whylome wont the Templar knights to bide, Till they decayed through pride.'"

And, "indeed," he adds, "it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis."