Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London. Arthur St. John Adcock

Stanfield’s House, Hampstead 151 “The Upper Flask,” from the Bowling Green 153 Keats’ House, Hampstead 157 Constable’s House, Hampstead 161 George du Maurier’s Grave, Hampstead 165 De Quincey’s House, Soho 171 Shelley’s House, Poland Street, W. 175 Shelley, Marchmont Street 179 Hazlitt’s House, Frith Street 183 Thomas Day, 36 Wellclose Square 189 Byron, 4 Bennet Street, St. James’s 195 Coleridge, Addison Bridge Place 201 Will’s Coffee House, Russell Street 217 Lamb, Colebrooke Row 219 Lamb’s Cottage, Edmonton 229 Tom Hood’s House, St. John’s Wood 237 Charles Dibdin, 34 Arlington Road 243 George Eliot, Wimbledon Park 247 George Eliot’s House, Chelsea 251 Queen’s House, Cheyne Walk 257 Whistler, 96 Cheyne Walk 263 Turner’s House, Cheyne Walk 269 Carlyle, Ampton Street 277 Carlyle’s House, Cheyne Row 283 Leigh Hunt’s House, Chelsea 289 Leigh Hunt, 16 Rowan Road, Hammersmith 295 The Charterhouse, from the Square 297 Thackeray’s House, Kensington 301 Lamb Building, Temple, from the Cloisters 307 Dickens, Johnson Street, Camden Town 315 Dickens’s House, Doughty Street 319 Thurloe’s Lodgings, 24 Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn 329 Captain Marryat, Duke Street, St. James’s 333 Benjamin Franklin’s House, Craven Street 335 Cruikshank, 263 Hampstead Road 337 George Morland, “The Bull Inn,” Highgate 339 Rogers, St. James’s Place, from Green Park 341 Borrow’s House, Hereford Square 345

      ST. SAVIOUR’S. SOUTHWARK CATHEDRAL.

      

      FAMOUS LONDON HOUSES

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      SOME CELEBRATED COCKNEYS

      You cannot stir the ground of London anywhere but straightway it flowers into romance. Read the inscriptions on the crumbling tombs of our early merchant princes and adventurers in some of the old City churches, and it glimmers upon you that if ever the history of London’s commercial rise and progress gets adequately written it will read like a series of stories out of the Arabian Nights. Think what dashing and magnificent figures, what tales of dark plottings, fierce warfare, and glorious heroisms must brighten and darken the pages of any political history of London; and even more glamorous, more intensely and humanly alive, would be a social history of London, beginning perhaps in those days of the fourteenth century when Langland was living in Cornhill and writing his Vision of Piers Plowman, or farther back still, in Richard the First’s time, when that fine spirit, the first of English demagogues, William Fitzosbert, was haranguing the folkmoot in St. Paul’s Churchyard, urging them to resist the tyrannic taxations of the Lord Mayor and his Court of wealthy Aldermen—a passion for justice that brought him into such danger that he and certain of his friends had to seek sanctuary, and barricaded themselves in Bow Church. The church was fired by order of a bishop who had no sympathy with reformers, and Fitzosbert and his friends, breaking out through the flames, were stabbed and struck down in Cheapside, hustled to the Tower, hastily tried and sentenced, dragged out by the heels through the streets, and hanged at Smithfield. I have always thought this would make a good, live starting-point, and had I but world enough and time I would sooner write that history than anything else.