CHAPTER X

MUSEUMS

BRITISH MUSEUM

“O place! O people! Manners! framed to please All nations, customs, kindreds, languages!” HERRICK.

I am rather diffident about putting any name on this chapter, for no one would ever think of calling the British Museum an unnoticed place. It has what the newspapers call a world-wide reputation. Its very name smacks of solid worth with nothing unexpected about it. It is an institution looming large and august, its massive masonry dominating Bloomsbury as its reputation does the universe, and absorbing an unending queue of earnest-minded people intent on storing their minds with knowledge.

And yet, every time my frivolous feet have strayed through that solemn portico, I have longed to tell the thousands of people who never dream of coming so far north as Great Russell Street, W.C. 1, of unexpected things they could find there if they would. I remember as a small person being made to recite the names of the seven wonders of the world, and I used to repeat solemnly, “The Temple of Mausolaus at Halicarnassus--the Pyramid of Cheops--the Lighthouse of Alexandria--the Colossus of Rhodes--the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis--the Statue of Jupiter at Olympus, and the Temple of Diana at Ephesus”--with a considerable amount of annoyance that I could never hope to see these ancient splendours. When I found the remains of two of them in the British Museum, I felt, like the Queen of Sheba, that the half had not been told to me, and since that first moment of delighted surprise how many unexpected things I have found there which make me long to say to all the unwitting London visitors, “Don’t be put off by the solemnity of its name and the distance from Bond Street, but go, only go, and you will be rewarded.”

The proper way to make friends with a museum, as with people, is to get to know it slowly, or its very excellences will give you a surfeited memory. I once avoided the beautiful old Cluny Museum in Paris for many years, because I had been oppressed by the fact that it contained 11,000 objects of interest. No one had shown me how to ignore their number and get to love the very walls of Cardinal Jacques d’Amboise’s stately house, by never crossing the sunny courtyard to see more than one sort of exhibit at a time.

I think this plan is even more applicable to the British Museum, that great collection, partly bequeathed by Sir Hans Sloane and opened to the public in 1759. There are two things the hurried visitor can do so as to carry away the possession of a definite memory of one phase of the treasures contained in the vast building in Great Russell Street. He may choose to go there at the hours of 12 or 3 P.M. and follow one of the two expert lecturers who conduct people each day to see a different group of exhibits and listen to their story. (Lists of these lectures are given at the door.) Or he may choose for himself the sort of thing he finds most interesting and sternly traverse the other rooms intent only on the objects of his choice. In either case he is luckier than the visitors in the early days of the museum’s existence, who were herded in companies of only fifteen for a two hours’ visit.

To-day one is diffident about directing any choice; as the old guardian said, “Most people ’as their fancies!” They may lie in the direction of the mummy rooms, where the prehistoric man, so startlingly like a modern, crouches in his grave, with his stone flints within reach, or in the room of gold ornaments and gems, where lie the necklaces that rose and fell on breasts dead these thousand years, necklaces that differ nowise from the amethyst and jade trinkets to be seen in Bond Street to-day.

Or you may like best to stroll in that pleasant place the King’s Library--a long, gracious apartment where the sunlight gilds the warm brown of the lovely tooled bindings of George III.’s books.

Into this spacious room come all sorts of people--small boys in knickerbockers anxious to consult the postage stamp collections, artists to pore over delicately illuminated pages of fifteenth-century manuscripts, students to worship at the shrine of first editions of Shakespeare and Spenser, and people who are touched with the human interest of poignant letters like that of Mary Queen of Scots to “ma bonne sœur et cousine Elizabeth.”

But when I am fancy-free, and come to the British Museum, perhaps with only an hour to spare and no very definite idea about what I want to see, I choose one of two courses. Either I spend the entire hour in walking briskly through the galleries and taking a sort of bird’s-eye view of the different kinds of treasures that the museum guards, without making an attempt at intimacy with any one of them--or I turn to the left of the big entrance hall, pass through the Roman and Greco-Roman rooms and spend the whole time in the western wing, because there I can see the art of three great nations of the ancient world and the greatest of all the museum’s treasures--the Elgin Marbles. In the galleries surrounding them are the stupendous sculptures of Egypt and Assyria; statues of the Egyptian kings who lived 3000 years ago; colossal bulls, human-headed, that once guarded the gate of the palace that belonged to the father of one Sennacherib, King of Assyria, who “came up against all the defenced cities of Judah and took them,” and fragments from his own great palace of Nineveh.

Théophile Gautier’s words:

Tout passe.--L’art robuste Seul a l’étérnité: Le buste Survit à la cité,

come into one’s mind, for the bas-reliefs show the effect of the fire of the Babylonians and Medes when they destroyed “Nineveh that great city” in 609 B.C., yet they survived and the city is as dust! What a people they must have been, the folk who built the Lycian tombs, you can see best when you are half-way down the steps into the Mausoleum room, where lie the tremendous fragments of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world--the tomb that his wife and sister built for Mausolos, Prince of Caria, in a little town in Asia Minor some 2275 years ago.

Traces of another of the seven wonders are in the Ephesus room, where remains of the vast Temple of Artemis, “Diana of the Ephesians,” are gathered, and this room leads to the greatest wonder of them all, the pediment groups of statues from the Parthenon at Athens, that most of us call _tout court_ the Elgin Marbles.

I believe that a great many people have a vague idea that Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, did a little “scrounging” when he was British ambassador to the Porte in 1801, and that our possession of these sculptures is due to a mixture of luck and audacity.

It is really due to the common sense, artistic perception and generosity of a statesman who at great inconvenience and a cost to himself of £70,000, only half of which sum he later received from the English Government, removed the treasures that were daily being destroyed by the Turkish bombardment and that, but for his action, would have been irretrievably lost to the world.

One does not need to be an artist nor learned in artistic lore to feel the peculiar charm of the Elgin Marbles. I have seen quite ignorant people approach them with unseeing eyes and some flippancy about their mutilation on the lips, but after a few minutes’ contemplation, something of the calm beauty of the pose, the benignant sweep of the drapery, damp with the sea-spray, the mystery of those nostalgic figures, penetrates the onlooker and the work of Pheidias and his craftsmen has wrought its spell.

Now and then the official lecturer tells the story of what they had in their minds when they carved those noble statues, carved every inch of them, even the parts they thought would never again be seen by any human eye once they were placed on the pediment of the Great Temple, and you come away feeling that your eyes have been opened to a great beauty and the truth of it sinks into the soul.

It is not possible in these brief notes to mention more than a very few of the unnoticed treasures in the British Museum. As the old porter said, there is something to interest everyone.

If you search you may come across the manuscript of Rupert Brooke’s immortal sonnet, the toys small children played with 2000 years ago, Mrs. Delany’s curious paper flowers in the students’ room of the print collection and many, many other things to draw you there.

FOUNDLING HOSPITAL

“O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town, Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own!” BLAKE.

Not far from the British Museum is the Foundling Hospital in Guilford Street. One hears of it vaguely as an orphan asylum where the children wear quaint costumes that may be seen at the service in the chapel on Sunday mornings, when the singing attracts many visitors.

But there are more reasons than that to take you to this corner off the beaten track of the West End. For one thing, it may not be there very long. Already there are rumours that the Foundling Hospital may be moved to the country and one more link with eighteenth-century London be snapped.

Institutions as a rule are about as dull to see as to live in, but the Foundling Hospital is an exception. Handel, Hogarth and Dickens all gave tangible proof that they loved the place, and people from all over the world come to see it, attracted either by the reputation of the choir, the fame of the pictures in the museum, or the pathetic interest of the children, who indeed look merry, healthy little creatures.

Its story is almost too well known to need repetition: A seventeenth-century sea-captain, living during the latter half of his life in Rotherhithe, was distressed by the sight of deserted children he saw on his way to and from the city. It took good Captain Thomas Coram seventeen years of hard work to turn his dream of a well-endowed hospital for deserted children into a reality, but in 1739 he got a royal charter and a house was opened for them in Hatton Garden. The Foundling Hospital, as we know it, was begun in 1742.

Hogarth has painted a wonderful portrait of the founder, and looking at the cheerful benevolent face one can understand why he wrote, “The portrait I painted with the utmost pleasure and in which I particularly wished to excel was that of Captain Coram for the Foundling Hospital.” The kindly eyes that Hogarth drew were forever seeing something to be done for his fellow men, for the Foundling Hospital was only one of the old sea-captain’s philanthropies, to which he literally gave away all he had. In his old age, when he was asked if he would mind accepting a pension collected from his friends, he said quite simply, “I have not wasted the little wealth of which I was formerly possessed in self-indulgence or vain expenses, and am not ashamed to confess that in this my old age I am poor.” He accepted a pension of a little more than £100, and is buried in the vaults under the Foundling Hospital Chapel. That is the story of Thomas Coram, whose statue is at the entrance gate and whose name is remembered in Great Coram Street and Little Coram Street.

The best time to see the hospital is at the Sunday morning service at eleven o’clock, and the easiest way to reach it is by the tube to Russell Square. Turn to the right on leaving the tube and walk down Grenville Street and Guilford Street, and the Foundling Hospital will be seen to the left.

Go up to the gallery if you want to see the children seated on each side of the organ, dressed in the quaint costume that has never altered since it was decreed by the founder.

Dickens, who loved the hospital and had a seat in the chapel during the ten years he lived in Bloomsbury, makes Mrs. Meagles say in _Little Dorrit_:

Oh, dear, dear, ... when I saw all those children ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none of them has ever known on earth, to the great Father of us all in Heaven, I thought, does any wretched mother ever come here, and look among those young faces, wondering which is the poor child she brought into this forlorn world.

But the rules of the Foundling Hospital have changed since Thomas Coram’s time. Only the children of known mothers are now received, and

if later in life the mother marries and can prove that she is able to support her child, she can claim it again. The children are never allowed to be adopted. They are sent to foster-mothers in the country when first received, and only come to the hospital when they are six. The girls with few exceptions are trained for domestic service and the boys as regimental bandsmen, if they show talent, or they are apprenticed to different trades when they are fourteen.

There is something infinitely touching in the sight of these rows of small creatures, chanting with their trained treble voices, “Let me never be confounded,” when life had confounded them at its very gates. But seeing them later on, as every Sunday morning visitor is allowed to do, happily eating their dinners in their pleasant rooms, it is obvious that the life of the little brown-coated boy or white-capped girl in Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital has many things in its favour. One may compare their lot with that of more sophisticated children in the London slums, for whom it is necessary to have a society for their protection from the parents who have ill-treated over 100,000 in England in the last year.

One does not ordinarily associate a foundling hospital with the fine arts, but, as I said before, this is an exception. Hogarth not only painted the founder’s portrait and one or two other pictures that he gave to the hospital, but he persuaded his friends to do likewise. Sir Joshua Reynolds gave a portrait of Lord Dartmouth, Gainsborough a view of Charterhouse, Kneller a portrait of Handel, and the exhibition of these gifts, including a beautiful cartoon of Raphael’s _Massacre of the Innocents_, was a forerunner of the exhibitions of the Royal Academy. The pictures alone are worth going to Guilford Street to see. Some of them are in the picture gallery with the cases holding tokens that in the old days before 1760 used to be left to identify the foundling. In the board-room, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful rooms in London, hangs Hogarth’s _March to Finchley_, of which I believe there is a copy in the ugly “Adam and Eve” public-house, built on the site of the “Adam and Eve” Inn of the picture, at the corner of the Tottenham Court Road and Euston Road.

The tale of how the hospital came to get the picture is rather quaint. Hogarth painted soldiers marching to Finchley in a state that their French _confrères_ would call “_débraillés_.” He then asked George II. to buy it, but that monarch--the last English king to go into battle--was so enraged at this presentation of his soldiers, that he indignantly refused, and Hogarth, not being able to dispose of the picture elsewhere, issued lottery tickets for it. About sixty tickets were left on his hands, so he gave them to his favourite hospital, which won the picture, and there it is to-day.

The careful training of the child choir, and the choice of a musical career for the boys whenever possible, is only carrying on one of the earliest traditions, for Handel rivalled Hogarth in his interest and his gifts to the Foundling Hospital. He used to conduct performances of the _Messiah_ in the chapel to crowded audiences, and as he induced the performers to give their services, the proceeds that he handed over sometimes amounted to nearly £1,000. In a glass case is carefully preserved the gift the great master bestowed on the hospital of the MS. of his oratorio, and near by is the autograph copy of the number of _Good Words_ containing the story Dickens wrote about the Foundling Hospital.

In the secretary’s room is a fine old Jacobean oak table but lately retrieved from the kitchen premises where it had been in use for centuries.

SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM

“Were I a physician I would prescribe nothing but Recipe, CCCLXV drachm. Londin.”--WALPOLE.

One of the nicest things about the South Kensington Museum is the lively way it keeps in touch with what happens to be interesting Londoners at the moment.

Is there a loan exhibition of Spanish pictures at Burlington House, at once everything Spanish that the Museum possesses is gathered together so that the different phases of Spanish art may be conveniently noted, and there is nearly always some extra little exhibition of special interest, either in celebration of the centenary of some great artist or to introduce the work of some foreigner of outstanding merit like Mestrovic.

The lectures given here daily by expert guides at 12 and 3 p.m. would probably be crowded if they cost a guinea. With that curious apathy towards what is not expensive that is one of our less pleasing attributes, only a few people take advantage of these pleasant scholarly talks. If they were known to be very exclusive and costly, the thousands of excellent people with modest incomes and no occupation who live in Bloomsbury and Earl’s Court boarding-houses, would sigh for the privilege of sharing these hour-long strolls through the museum, when the lecturer gives no disconnected account of individual objects but deftly traces the development of the art of different countries and ages, illustrating his teaching by the treasures under his care.

I think this apathy is largely due to lack of initiative and imagination, as well as to the aforesaid deeply-rooted idea that what costs nothing cannot be worth much. I have found so many people who have never heard of these lectures that another cause of the small attendance may be that the news of their existence is not sufficiently widely spread.

There is, alas, no one at Claridge’s or the Ritz or the Savoy to tell mothers who bring their girls over here to buy clothes and do the theatres, that there is also a way open to them to gain something that will still be theirs when the memory of the play has faded--in most cases let us hope so--and the clothes have been cast aside--since no one nowadays wears clothes long enough to wear them out.

The South Kensington Museum is the finest museum of applied art in the world. That is why it is the Mecca of students who come here to study and draw inspiration from the lovely things fashioned by our forefathers in gold and silver and bronze and leather, in silk and lace and precious stones, in the furnishings and decorations of the houses and persons of other times and other nations. There are paintings and sculpture as well: the Raphael cartoons are one of the glories of the place.

There is something, indeed, to appeal to everyone’s taste in this most marvellous museum. For the little schoolgirls who seem to throng the place in cohorts, in the charge of apathetic teachers, there are the dolls and dolls’ houses that their great-grandmothers played with--the former as delicately waxen and elegantly dressed as any to be found to-day. Furniture lovers may study here the finest specimens of every period, from the handsome Jacobean chairs and settles that harmonise so well with the background of panelled walls and decorated ceilings taken from old English houses, to the marvellous ornate escritoires, toilet tables and gilt couches of French royal palaces. There is less formality about the English furniture, but it was not more comfortable; and the heavy projecting carvings even on the back of the little children’s chairs may well have been the reason for the erect bearings used for odious comparisons in one’s youth. They say that the beds of our forefathers were comfortable. That may be true, but they were certainly depressing, and the state bed from Boughton House, Northampton, in which William III. slept, with its dingy hangings and horrible hearse-like plumes, reaching into the lofty roof, makes you thankful for the airier ideas of to-day.

For book-lovers there are upstairs the old, old missals and books of hours, illuminated with such skill and patience by monks in mediæval monasteries--some with colours almost as perfect, the ink as black, the paper as white as when they were first executed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As marvellous, and perhaps even more exquisite as works of art, are the slender Persian volumes, love-poems and prayers, inscribed in delicate characters of the East, with pictures of shahs and houris, and leather covers, so wonderfully embossed and inlaid and beautifully coloured that no description could give the faintest idea of their perfection.

Even people who are not musicians love the gallery where musical instruments of the past stand silent in their cases: guitars that troubadours in parti-coloured hose twanged dolorously to their lady-loves; virginals belonging to Queen Elizabeth and that other Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, who was a daughter of James I.; the harpsichord that Handel bequeathed to George II.; the great harp of the famous blind Welsh harper. Zithers are there, and other instruments of cunning workmanship, lovely to see and with names as melodious as the sounds they once gave forth: dulcimers and clavicords, lutes and ceteras, pandores and clavecins. Here are the spinets of our grandmothers, and what must be the veritable father of the hurdy-gurdy, and a little pianino made by Chappell more than one hundred years ago, so small that you could carry it about from place to place.

Then there is the jewellery--bracelets, girdles, necklaces, earrings, rings chosen and worn by “Flora la Belle Rommaine” and her sisters of other ages and countries, but so like, both in design and execution, the work of the modern goldsmith.

There is an interesting and beautiful collection of the peasant jewellery of continental countries--wonderful gilt crowns of Russian and Norwegian brides and curious rings of gigantic size and significant names, charm rings, motto rings, incantation rings, iconigraphic rings, Gnostic rings and rings with all sorts of devices.

These are only a tithe of the treasures in the Victoria and Albert Museum that can easily be reached by District Railway and Inner Circle to South Kensington Station or by the Piccadilly Tube and the Brompton Road.

WALLACE COLLECTION

“Ce qui nous a tous profondément touchés, c’est moins la grandeur de vos largesses, qui ont été immenses, que la bonne grâce spirituelle avec laquelle vous les avez faites.”

SARCEY.

People say vaguely, “The Wallace Collection? Oh, yes, I really must go some day; I’ve heard of it so many times,” and the “some day” recedes and London is left behind and that most delightful place remains unseen.

And yet this treasure-house is so easy to reach. The shopper at Debenham and Freebody’s need only turn up Duke Street at the corner where Wigmore Street embraces Lower Seymour Street, and there is Manchester House at the far side of Manchester Square.

If you have only a short time to spend there, give it all to the French pictures. They are the _pièce de résistance_ of the Wallace Collection, gathered by two men who loved France and spent most of their lives there. The story of the Hertfords who made the Wallace Collection is almost as interesting as anything in their house. The first Marquess of Hertford had thirteen children, and the portraits he asked Reynolds to paint of two of his daughters (Nos. 31 and 33) were the nucleus of the collection. The second marquess only added Reynolds’ “Nelly O’Brien” and the Romney “Perdita.”

His son was the celebrated Marquess of Hertford whose meteoric career enlivened the first half of the last century--the original of both Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne and Lord Beaconsfield’s Coningsby, whose wealth, wit and reckless egoism provided food for gossip for many a year. It was for him that Decimus Burton built St. Dunstan’s in Regent’s Park, and he filled it with _objets d’art_ of all kinds, and a number of pictures, chiefly of the Dutch school.

His son, Richard Seymour-Conway, fourth Marquess of Hertford, spent his life in amassing, with the help of Sir Richard Wallace, the collection that is now the property of the British nation. M. Yriarte, a French art expert who knew this eccentric nobleman well, published an account of his curious life in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ for September 1900, but it is not possible to give the details now.

Sir Richard Wallace inherited his wealth and his pictures. His name is legendary here in England, but in Paris it is a household word, for every thirsty street urchin calls the graceful bronze drinking fountains he put all over the city “un Vallace.”

M. Francisque Sarcey, who never met Sir Richard Wallace, has expressed in the dedication of his _Le Siège de Paris_ something of the feeling Parisians had for this Englishman who stayed in the city, sharing their perils and discomforts and proving his sympathy by immense gifts. Luckily for us, his friendship did not induce him to leave the Hertford Collection to France. He had always shared his father’s passion for collecting, and began to buy pictures as a young man. The Corot, Rousseau’s lovely _Forest Glade_, and the enchanting fresco on plaster of a _Boy Reading_ by the Milanese artist Foppa, are among the works he bought.

To come back to the French pictures: there is no example of Chardin’s work (to see “Le Bénédicité” you must go to the Louvre), but there are eight pictures by his pupil Fragonard, and if the Louvre has “The Music Lesson,” Hertford House has the “Gardens of the Villa d’Este.”

I think the Fragonards must be seen if there is time for nothing else; not because Fragonard is a greater artist than the others, but because his work may be better studied here than in his own country.

There is a lovely interior of Fragonard’s in the National Gallery, and a “Lady with a Dog” in the Tennant Collection, 34 Queen Anne’s Gate, but I am informed that the present occupiers of the Glenconner mansion do not follow the generous custom of the owners in admitting the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays from two to six.

The eccentric Marquess’s statement, “I only like pleasing pictures,” perhaps accounts for the number of Greuze canvases--over a score; but the collection is particularly rich in eighteenth-century French painters--Largillière, Watteau, Nattier, Lancret, Vernet, Van Loo, Boucher, etc.

If you have time for two visits, spend the second with the Dutch pictures, where the Rembrandt portraits almost console me for the absence of Vermeer’s. One must go to the National Gallery to see the “Lady at the Virginal.”

Among the fifty-seven artists represented, there are many old friends, Frans Hals, Brouwer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dou, Terborch, Wouverman with his inevitable white horse, six of the excellent Ruysdaels--that somehow never give me as much pleasure as Metsu’s charming pictures--Hobbema, the Flemish Teniers, and eight Rubens (he is more likeable here than in the Louvre).

Of course there are numberless other treasures. A very complete catalogue will tell you all about them, but I hope I have made you want to go and buy that catalogue.

GEFFRYE MUSEUM

“So I set out on my walk to see the wonders of the big city, and, as chance would have it, I directed my course to the East.”--G. BORROW.

I have never met anyone who knew of this Benjamin among museums--it was only opened the year the war came upon us--except the man of learning who told me that, tucked away in the heart of the manufacturing district of Shoreditch, there was a wonderful collection of period furniture arranged in an old almshouse. So one day I climbed into a 22 bus at Piccadilly Circus and asked the conductor to discard me at the Geffrye Museum in the Kingsland Road. We travelled for miles along streets where every second shop seemed to be a cabinet-maker’s, and then stopped conveniently at the very gate of the quiet, spacious courtyard where elderly people were taking the air on the old oak benches. It was past six of the clock on a warm evening in June, but a misguided guide-book had said the museum was open till eight in summer.

That halcyon arrangement disappeared with the fashion of the eight-hour day, and the museum now closes at six o’clock like its older _confrères_. It is also closed on Sunday morning and all Monday.

The people who used to live in the fourteen quaint little brick almshouses have been transferred to a building in the country, and the London County Council has bought this property for their museum from the Ironmongers’ Company, from whose seventeenth-century “Master,” Sir Robert Geffrye, it takes its name. It is a fascinating place; like a rather badly arranged old curiosity shop. There are old staircases--one from Boswell’s house in Queen Street is the most beautiful--and lovely panelled rooms and all sorts of things that demonstrate how beautiful interior decoration was before the age of machine-made furniture.

There is a charming room from New Court, Lincoln’s Inn, and many other interesting exhibits including a beautiful lacquered Chinese palanquin, but what I liked best were the fragile, unbelievable wood carvings of Grinling Gibbons.

If there were nothing else to see in the Geffrye Museum, it would be worth while to go to look at what a master hand can do with a block of wood. Evelyn thought Grinling Gibbons “the greatest master both of invention and rarenesse of work that the world ever had in any age.”

I had cherished the mistaken belief that Gibbons was an Englishman for so long that it was with regret I found that this great artist was born in Rotterdam and only came to England in 1667 when he was twenty-four years old.

It is many long years since I was first shown some of Grinling Gibbons’ marvellous work--so many that only the effect it had on me remains, while the date and place have gone from me. I never willingly miss seeing what his hand has carved, and if any reader of these pages is in the habit of coming to London often and making friends on each trip with another of the men of genius who have given the city its proud record, I can tell them where they may study the wizardlike work of this master craftsman and great artist.

The most magnificent piece of work he carved is in the choir of St. Paul’s, but there are long festoons of flowers in St. Mary Abchurch, in Abchurch Yard, off Abchurch Lane, a turning out of Cannon Street. In old St. Mary Abchurch you will also find a wonderful painted dome by Sir James Thornhill, Hogarth’s father-in-law, whose house in Dean Street, Soho, has only lately been pulled down. St. James’s, Piccadilly, that suave building that breathes mid-Victorian portliness, broadcloth and self-satisfaction, has a lovely marble font carved by Grinling Gibbons, but the cover was stolen. Later research has destroyed the widely-spread belief that Grinling Gibbons carved the pedestal for King Charles I.’s statue in Trafalgar Square, but over the mantelpiece in the vestry of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East, between Great Tower Street and Lower Thames Street, you will find another carving.

The rest I will leave you to hunt out for yourself. Some of it is in unlikely places, one of them not a hundred miles from Clifford’s Inn. I do not know if there is any trace of the pot of flowers Grinling Gibbons carved when he lived in Belle Sauvage Court on Ludgate Hill, and which Walpole said “shook surprisingly with the motion of the coaches that passed by.”

He lived for forty-three years in Bow Street, Covent Garden. The house fell down, says an old record, in 1701, “but by a genial providence none of the family were killed,” and they seem to have propped up their house, for they went on living there till Grinling Gibbons died in 1721.