II. LONDON AUTHORS. WHEN the pert chambermaid had removed the breakfast-tray, and the clerical-looking waiter poked the bituminous mass in the grate, until it fairly blazed, I looked out of the window upon the doleful line of cabs, with their smoking horses and mackintoshed proprietors, speculating upon the possible locomotive advantage obtainable therefrom in such weather. The statue of Charles the Martyr stood grimly under a perpetual douche, and the top of Nelson's column was garlanded with fog. Both seemed to endure the baptism with cynical hardihood; but all thoughts of the hero of the Nile and the regicides, were dissipated by the names on the glistening panels of each omnibus that dashed by the square. "Hampstead" made me think of poor Keats and his walks when the daisies bloomed along the lanes of that suburban retreat, and of Cunningham, Sydney Smith, and Hood, who lie in its church yard; "Kensington" raised the image of good Mrs. Inchbald in her retirement there; "Turnham Green" revived Goldsmith's joke; "Highgate" suggested Coleridge, and "Sydenham" Campbell; and I caught myself repeating, with emphasis, "What's hallowed ground?" As if to answer the question, the bell of St. Martin's opposite began to chime; and I remembered that in its vault repose, in most incongruous juxtaposition, Nell Gwynne, John Hunter the anatomist, Boyle the philosopher, and one of the brothers who charmed the town, thirty years ago, with that most clever jeu d'esprit, "The Rejected Addresses." The organ of locality, warmed by the talisman of these names, suddenly fraternized with imagination and memory, and I resolved upon a pilgrimage to the haunts and homes of London authors. I began to trace, on a map of the city, the silver lines, which, as a web of light, intersect and overlay the crowded streets and dingy buildings of the modern Babel, with the memories of those who thence sped arrows of thought and dreams of romance over the world; and bequeathed intellectual dignity and enchantment to what otherwise is but a vast aggregation of bricks, mortar, traffic, population, magnificence, and want. Two minutes scarcely elapsed after I rang the sexton's bell at St. Giles's church, Cripplegate, before that personage ushered me urbanely into the aisle. The roof of the building is modern, but the dark carvings on pulpit and choir indicate an age of two centuries. I stood at the altar where Cromwell and Ben Jonson were married; marked the pavement beneath which Fox, the author of "The Book of Martyrs," is buried; and read the inscription on the Lucy vault-a family satirized in the character of Shallow, and which incarnates for everlasting ridicule the sapient justice who would have proved Shakspere a deer-stealer. I examined the quaint old tomb of the historian Speede; and, from a window, looked upon a fragment of the Roman wall-the greatest antiquity of London, hard by the venerable Cripplegate. Over against a pew, a familiar bust marks the spot beneath which are the mortal remains of Milton; and his epitaph is grand in its simplicity-"The author of Paradise Lost." He and his father before him were intendants of this church. How sublime to the imagination is this otherwise not remarkable temple where that beautiful head was bowed in prayer! I recalled his image as it lay in youthful beauty, one summer afternoon, on the greensward, under the classic trees of the college-lawn, when a fair lady hung entranced above the sleeper, and left a scroll in his nerveless hand. I saw him in his prime, conversing with Galileo, and looking forth, with all a poet's rapture, upon Val d'Arno from the wooded summit of Fiesole. I beheld him when time had silvered his flowing hair, with sightless orbs uplifted, as his fin |