Part 75
It is not intended to point out the tortuous directions of Hagbush-lane; for the chief object of this notice is to excite the reader to one of the pleasantest walks he can imagine, and to tax his ingenuity to the discovery of the route the road takes. This, the _ancient_ north road, comes into the _present_ north road, in Upper Holloway, at the foot of Highgate-hill, and went in that direction to Hornsey. From the mud-cottage towards London, it proceeded between Paradise-house, the residence of Mr. Greig, the engraver, and the Adam and Eve public-house, in the Holloway back-road, and by circuitous windings approached London, at the distance of a few feet on the eastern side of the City Arms public-house, in the City-road, and continued towards Old-street, St. Luke’s. It no where communicated with the back-road, leading from Battle-bridge to the top of Highgate-hill, called Maiden-lane.
Hagbush-lane is well known to every botanizing perambulator on the west side of London. The wild onion, clowns-wound-wort, wake-robin, and abundance of other simples, lovely in their form, and of high medicinal repute in our old herbals and receipt-books, take root, and seed and flower here in great variety. How long beneath the tall elms and pollard oaks, and the luxuriant beauties on the banks, the infirm may be suffered to seek health, and the healthy to recreate, who shall say? Spoilers are abroad.
_Through_ Hagbush-lane every man has a right to ride and walk; _in_ Hagbush-lane no one man has even a shadow of right to an inch as private property. It is a public road, and public property. The trees, as well as the road, are public property; and the very form of the road is public property. Yet bargains and sales have been made, and are said to be now making, under which the trees are cut down and sold, and the public road thrown, bit by bit, into private fields as pasture. Under no conveyance or admission to land by any proprietor, whether freeholder or lord of a manor, can any person legally dispossess the public of a single foot of Hagbush-lane, or obstruct the passage of any individual through it. All the people of London, and indeed all the people of England, have a right in this road as a common highway. Hitherto, among the inhabitants of Islington, many of whom are opulent, and all of whom are the local guardians of the public rights in this road, not one has been found with sufficient public virtue, or rather with enough of common manly spirit, to compel the restoration of public plunder, and in his own defence, and on the behalf of the public, arrest the _highway_ robber.
Building, or what may more properly be termed the tumbling up of tumbledown houses, to the north of London, is so rapidly increasing, that in a year or two there will scarcely be a green spot for the resort of the inhabitants. Against covering of private ground in this way, there is no resistance; but against its evil consequences to health, some remedy should be provided by the setting apart of open spaces for the exercise of walking in the fresh air. The preservation of Hagbush-lane therefore is, in this point of view, an object of public importance. Where it has not been thrown into private fields, from whence, however, it is recoverable, it is one of the loveliest of our green lanes; and though persons from the country smile at Londoners when they talk of being “rural” at the distance of a few miles from town, a countryman would find it difficult to name any lane in his own county, more sequestered or of greater beauty.
LINES
WRITTEN IN HAGBUSH-LANE.
A scene like this, Would woo the care-worn wise To moralize, And courting lovers court to tell their bliss.
Had I a cottage here I’d be content; for where I have my books I have old friends, Whose cheering looks Make me amends.
For coldnesses in men: and so, With them departed long ago, And with wild-flowers and trees And with the living breeze, And with the “still small voice” Within, I would rejoice, And converse hold, while breath Held me, and then--come Death!
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FLORAL DIRECTORY.
Blue Sowthistle. _Sonchus Cœruleus._ Dedicated to _B. Raingarda_.
[189] Mr. Nelson’s History of Islington.
[190] To Mr. Simes, bailiff of the manor, I am indebted for a sight of this rental.
[191] Mr. Nelson’s History of Islington.
[192] Mr. Utterson’s Preface to his edition of Lord Berners’ Froissart, 2 vols. 4to.
[193] Mr. Fosbroke’s Dict. of Antiquities.
[194] Pope’s Homer.
[195] Golden Legend.
[196] Mr. Fosbroke’s Dict. of Antiquities.
[197] Strutt’s sports, from Mr. Nichol’s Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, &c.
[198] Mr. Nelson’s History of Islington.
[199] Ibid.
[200] Hoby MSS.
~June 27.~
_St. Ladislas_ I., king of Hungary, A. D. 1095. _St. John_, of Moutier, 6th Cent.
THE SEASON.
Mr. Howard, in his work on the weather, is of opinion, that farmers and others, who are particularly interested in being acquainted with the variations in the weather, derive considerable aid from the use of the barometer. He says, “in fact, much less of valuable fodder is spoiled by wet now than in the days of our forefathers. But there is yet room for improvement in the knowledge of our farmers on the subject of the atmosphere. It must be a subject of great satisfaction and confidence to the husbandman, to know, at the beginning of a summer, by the certain evidence of meteorological results on record, that the season, in the ordinary course of things, may be expected to be a dry and warm one; or to find, in a certain period of it, that the average quantity of rain to be expected for the month has already fallen. On the other hand, when there is reason, from the same source of information, to expect much rain, the man who has courage to begin his operations under an unfavourable sky, but with good ground to conclude, from the state of his instruments and his collateral knowledge, that a fair interval is approaching, may often be profiting by his observations; while his cautious neighbour, who waited for the weather to ‘settle,’ may find that he has let the opportunity go by. This superiority, however, is attainable by a very moderate share of application to the subject; and by the keeping of a plain diary of the barometer and raingauge with the hygrometer and the vane under his daily notice.”
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FLORAL DIRECTORY.
Perforated St. John’s Wort. _Hypericum perforatum._ Dedicated to _St. John_.
~June 28.~
_St. Irenæus_, Bp. of Lyons, A. D. 202. _St. Leo_ II., Pope A. D. 683. _Sts. Plutarch_ and others, Martyrs, about A. D. 202. _Sts. Potamiana_ and _Basilides_, Martyrs.
CHRONOLOGY.
1797. George Keate, F.R.S., died, aged sixty-seven. He was born at Trowbridge in Wilts, educated at Kingston school, called to the bar, abandoned the profession of the law, amused himself with his pen, and wrote several works. His chief production is the account of “Capt. Wilson’s Voyage to the Pelew Islands;” his “Sketches from Nature,” written in the manner of Sterne, are pleasing and popular.
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FLORAL DIRECTORY.
Blue Cornflower. _Centaurea Cyanus._ Dedicated to _St. Irenæus_.
NOW, _A hot day_.
Now the rosy- (and lazy-) fingered Aurora, issuing from her saffron house, calls up the moist vapours to surround her, and goes veiled with them as long as she can; till Phœbus, coming forth in his power, looks every thing out of the sky, and holds sharp uninterrupted empire from his throne of beams. Now the mower begins to make his sweeping cuts more slowly, and resorts oftener to the beer. Now the carter sleeps a-top of his load of hay, or plods with double slouch of shoulder, looking out with eyes winking under his shading hat, and with a hitch upward of one side of his mouth. Now the little girl at her grandmother’s cottage-door watches the coaches that go by, with her hand held up over her sunny forehead. Now labourers look well, resting in their white shirts at the doors of rural alehouses. Now an elm is fine there, with a seat under it; and horses drink out of the trough, stretching their yearning necks with loosened collars; and the traveller calls for his glass of ale, having been without one for more than ten minutes; and his horse stands wincing at the flies, giving sharp shivers of his skin, and moving to and fro his ineffectual docked tail; and now Miss Betty Wilson, the host’s daughter, comes streaming forth in a flowered gown and earrings, carrying with four of her beautiful fingers the foaming glass, for which, after the traveller has drank it, she receives with an indifferent eye, looking another way, the lawful two-pence: that is to say, unless the traveller, nodding his ruddy face, pays some gallant compliment to her before he drinks, such as “I’d rather kiss you, my dear, than the tumbler,”--or “I’ll wait for you, my love, if you’ll marry me;” upon which, if the man is good-looking and the lady in good-humour, she smiles and bites her lips, and says “Ah--men can talk fast enough;” upon which the old stage-coachman, who is buckling something near her, before he sets off, says in a hoarse voice, “So can women too for that matter,” and John Boots grins through his ragged red locks, and doats on the repartee all the day after. Now grasshoppers “fry,” as Dryden says. Now cattle stand in water, and ducks are envied. Now boots and shoes, and trees by the road side, are thick with dust; and dogs rolling in it, after issuing out of the water, into which they have been thrown to fetch sticks, come scattering horror among the legs of the spectators. Now a fellow who finds he has three miles further to go in a pair of tight shoes, is in a pretty situation. Now rooms with the sun upon them become intolerable; and the apothecary’s apprentice, with a bitterness beyond aloes, thinks of the pond he used to bathe in at school. Now men with powdered heads (especially if thick) envy those that are unpowdered, and stop to wipe them up hill, with countenances that seem to expostulate with destiny. Now boys assemble round the village pump with a ladle to it, and delight to make a forbidden splash and get wet through the shoes. Now also they make suckers of leather, and bathe all day long in rivers and ponds, and follow the fish into their cool corners, and say millions of “_my_ eyes!” at “tittlebats.” Now the bee, as he hums along, seems to be talking heavily of the heat. Now doors and brick-walls are burning to the hand; and a walled lane, with dust and broken bottles in it, near a brick-field, is a thing not to be thought of. Now a green lane, on the contrary, thick-set with hedge-row elms, and having the noise of a brook “rumbling in pebble-stone,” is one of the pleasantest things in the world. Now youths and damsels walk through hay-fields by chance; and the latter say, “ha’ done then, William;” and the overseer in the next field calls out to “let thic thear hay thear bide;” and the girls persist, merely to plague “such a frumpish old fellow.”
Now, in town, gossips talk more than ever to one another, in rooms, in doorways, and out of windows, always beginning the conversation with saying that the heat is overpowering. Now blinds are let down, and doors thrown open, and flannel waistcoats left off, and cold meat preferred to hot, and wonder expressed why tea continues so refreshing, and people delight to sliver lettuces into bowls, and apprentices water doorways with tin-canisters that lay several atoms of dust. Now the water-cart, jumbling along the middle of the streets, and jolting the showers out of its box of water, really does something. Now boys delight to have a waterpipe let out, and set it bubbling away in a tall and frothy volume. Now fruiterers’ shops and dairies look pleasant, and ices are the only things to those who can get them. Now ladies loiter in baths; and people make presents of flowers; and wine is put into ice; and the after-dinner lounger recreates his head with applications of perfumed water out of long-necked bottles. Now the lounger, who cannot resist riding his new horse, feels his boots burn him. Now buckskins are not the lawn of Cos. Now jockies, walking in great coats to lose flesh, curse inwardly. Now five fat people in a stage coach, hate the sixth fat one who is coming in, and think he has no right to be so large. Now clerks in offices do nothing, but drink soda-water and spruce-beer, and read the newspaper. Now the old clothes-man drops his solitary cry more deeply into the areas on the hot and forsaken side of the street; and bakers look vicious; and cooks are aggravated: and the steam of a tavern kitchen catches hold of one like the breath of Tartarus. Now delicate skins are beset with gnats; and boys make their sleeping companion start up, with playing a burning-glass on his hand; and blacksmiths are super-carbonated; and coblers in their stalls almost feel a wish to be transplanted; and butter is too easy to spread; and the dragoons wonder whether the Romans liked their helmets; and old ladies, with their lappets unpinned, walk along in a state of dilapidation; and the servant-maids are afraid they look vulgarly hot; and the author, who has a plate of strawberries brought him, finds that he has come to the end of his writing.--_Indicator._
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In the “Miscellanies,” published by the Spalding Society of Antiquaries there is a poem of high feeling and strong expression against “man’s cruelty to man:”--
Why should mans high aspiring mind Burn in him, with so proud a breath; When all his haughty views can find In this world, yields to death; The fair, the brave, the vain, the wise, The rich, the poor, and great, and small, Are each, but worms anatomys, To strew, his quiet hall.
Power, may make many earthly gods, Where gold, and bribery’s guilt, prevails; But death’s, unwelcome honest odds, Kicks oer, the unequal scales. The flatter’d great, may clamours raise Of Power,--and, their own weakness hide, But death, shall find unlooked for ways To end the Farce of pride.--
An arrow, hurtel’d ere so high From e’en a giant’s sinewy strength, In time’s untraced eternity, Goes, but a pigmy length-- Nay, whirring from the tortured string, With all its pomp, of hurried flight, Tis, by the Skylarks little wing, Outmeasured, in its height.
Just so, mans boasted strength, and power, Shall fade, before deaths lightest stroke; Laid lower, than the meanest flower-- Whose pride, oertopt the oak. And he, who like a blighting blast, Dispeopled worlds, with wars alarms, Shall be himself destroyed at last, By poor, despised worms.
Tyrants in vain, their powers secure. And awe slaves’ murmurs, with a frown; But unawed death, at last is sure, To sap the Babels down-- A stone thrown upward, to the skye, Will quickly meet, the ground agen: So men-gods, of earths vanity, Shall drop at last, to men;
And power, and pomp, their all resign Blood purchased Thrones, and banquet Halls. Fate, waits to sack ambitions shrine As bare, as prison walls, Where, the poor suffering wretch bows down, To laws, a lawless power hath past;-- And pride, and power, and King, and Clown, Shall be death’s slaves at last.
Time, the prime minister of death, There’s nought, can bribe his honest will He, stops the richest Tyrants breath, And lays, his mischief still: Each wicked scheme for power, all stops, With grandeurs false, and mock display, As Eve’s shades, from high mountain tops. Fade with the rest, away.
Death levels all things, in his march, Nought, can resist his mighty strength; The Pallace proud,--triumphal arch, Shall mete, their shadows length: The rich, the poor, one common bed, Shall find, in the unhonoured grave, Where weeds shall crown alike, the head, Of Tyrant, and of Slave.
_Marvel._
~June 29.~
Holiday at the Public Offices, except Excise, Stamp, and Custom.
_St. Peter_, the Apostle. _St. Hemma_, A. D. 1045.
_St. Peter._
From this apostle the Romish church assumes to derive her authority, and appoints this his anniversary, which she splendidly celebrates. The illuminations at Rome on this day would astonish the apostle were he alive. From the account of a recent traveller, they appear to be more brilliant than an Englishman can well imagine; he witnessed them, and describes them in these words:--
“At Ave Maria we drove to the piazza of St. Peter’s. The lighting of the lanternoni, or large paper lanterns, each of which looks like a globe of ethereal fire, had been going on for an hour, and, by the time we arrived there, was nearly completed. As we passed the Ponte San Angelo, the appearance of this magnificent church, glowing in its own brightness--the millions of lights reflected in the calm waters of the Tiber, and mingling with the last golden glow of evening, so as to make the whole building seem covered with burnished gold, had a most striking and magical effect.
“Our progress was slow, being much impeded by the long line of carriages before us; but at length we arrived at the piazza of St. Peter’s, and took our station on the right of its farther extremity, so as to lose the deformity of the dark, dingy Vatican palace. The gathering shades of night rendered the illumination every moment more brilliant. The whole of this immense church--its columns, capitals, cornices, and pediments--the beautiful swell of the lofty dome, towering into heaven, the ribs converging into one point at top, surmounted by the lantern of the church, and crowned by the cross,--all were designed in lines of fire; and the vast sweep of the circling colonnades, in every rib, line, mould, cornice, and column, were resplendent in the same beautiful light.
“While we were gazing upon it, suddenly a bell chimed. On the cross of fire at the top waved a brilliant light, as if wielded by some celestial hand, and instantly ten thousand globes and stars of vivid fire seemed to roll spontaneously along the building, as if by magic; and self-kindled, it blazed in a moment into one dazzling flood of glory. Fancy herself, in her most sportive mood, could scarcely have conceived so wonderful a spectacle as the instantaneous illumination of this magnificent fabric: the agents by whom it was effected were unseen, and it seemed the work of enchantment. In the first instance, the illuminations had appeared to be complete, and one could not dream that thousands and tens of thousands of lamps were still to be illumined. Their vivid blaze harmonized beautifully with the softer, milder light of the lanternoni; while the brilliant glow of the whole illumination shed a rosy light upon the fountains, whose silver fall, and ever-playing showers, accorded well with the magic of the scene.
“Viewed from the Trinità de’ Monti, its effect was unspeakably beautiful: it seemed to be an enchanted palace hung in air, and called up by the wand of some invisible spirit. We did not, however, drive to the Trinità de’ Monti till after the exhibition of the girandola, or great fire-works from the castle of St. Angelo, which commenced by a tremendous explosion that represented the raging eruption of a volcano. Red sheets of fire seemed to blaze upwards into the glowing heavens, and then to pour down their liquid streams upon the earth. This was followed by an incessant and complicated display of every varied device that imagination could figure--one changing into another, and the beauty of the first effaced by that of the last. Hundreds of immense wheels turned round with a velocity that almost seemed as if demons were whirling them, letting fall thousands of hissing dragons, and scorpions, and fiery snakes, whose long convolutions, darting forward as far as the eye could reach in every direction, at length vanished into air. Fountains and jets of fire threw up their blazing cascades into the skies. The whole vault of heaven shone with the vivid fires, and seemed to receive into itself innumerable stars and suns, which, shooting up into it in brightness almost insufferable, vanished, like earth-born hopes. The reflection in the depth of the calm clear waters of the Tiber, was scarcely less beautiful than the spectacle itself; and the whole ended in a tremendous burst of fire, that, while it lasted, almost seemed to threaten conflagration to the world.
“The expense of the illumination of St. Peter’s, and of the girandola, when repeated two successive evenings, as they invariably are at the festival of St. Peter, is one thousand crowns; when only exhibited one night they cost seven hundred. Eighty men were employed in the instantaneous illuminations of the lamps, which to us seemed the work of enchantment: they were so posted as to be unseen.”[201]
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Dr. Forster, in certain remarks on the excitement of the imagination, cites some “Verses by a modern poet, on an appearance beheld in the clouds,” which may aptly come after the glowing description of the illumination of St. Peter’s:--
The appearance, instantaneously disclosed, Was of a mighty city--boldly say A wilderness of building, sinking far And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth Far sinking into splendour, without end! Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold, With alabaster domes and silver spires, And blazing terrace upon terrace, high Uplifted; here, serene pavilions bright In avenues disposed; there, towers begirt With battlements, that on their restless fronts Bore stars--illumination of all gems! By earthly nature had the effect been wrought Upon the dark materials of the storm Now pacified; on them, and on the coves, And mountain steeps and summits, whereunto The vapours had receded--taking there Their station under a cerulean sky.
CHRONOLOGY.
363. The emperor Julian died, aged thirty-two. He was denominated the apostate, from having professed Christianity before he ascended the throne, and afterwards relapsing to Paganism. He received his death wound in a battle with the Persians. Dr. Watkins in his “Biographical Dictionary” says, that he was virtuous and modest in his manners, and liberal in his disposition, an enemy to luxury, and averse to public amusements.
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FLORAL DIRECTORY.
Yellow Rattle. _Rhinanthus Galli._ Dedicated to _St. Peter_.
[201] Rome in the Nineteenth Century.
~June 30.~
_St. Paul_, the Apostle. _St. Martial_, Bp. of Limoges, 3d Cent.
_St. Paul._
Paul, the apostle, was martyred, according to some accounts, on the 29th of June, in the year, 65; according to others in the month of May, 66.[202] A Romish writer fables that, before he was beheaded, he “loked vp into heuen, markynge his foreheed and his breste with the sygne of the crosse,” although that sign was an after invention; and that, “as soone as the heed was from the body,” it said “Jesus Christus fyfty tymes.”[203] Another pretends from St. Chrysostom, that “from the head of St. Paul when it was cut off there came not one drop of blood, but there ran fountains of milk;” and that “we have by tradition, that the blessed head gave three leaps, and at each of them there sprung up a fountain where the head fell: which fountains remain to this day, and are reverenced with singular devotion by all Christian Catholics.”[204] The fictions of the Romish church, and its devotions to devices, are innumerable.
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FLORAL DIRECTORY.
Yellow Cistus. _Cistus Helianthemum._ Dedicated to _St. Paul_.
[202] Butler.