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the upper end of a tiny public square called the Plestor, or play-place, which dates only from yesterday, that is to say, from 1271! Originally an immense oak tree stood in the centre; but it was uprooted in a great storm some two centuries ago, and a sycamore now stands in its place. Encircling it is a bench upon which the rude forefathers of the hamlet may sit and watch the children at play, and on which we should have sat but that we were more interested in the great yew which stands in the near-by churchyard. It is one of the most famous trees in England, · thousand years old, they say, looking old for its age; but it is so symmetrical in its proportions that its immense size is not fully realized until one slowly paces round it and discovers that its trunk is almost thirty feet in circumference.

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The church, which has luckily escaped the restorations so many parish churches have been compelled to undergo, is in no wise remarkable. Many Whites are buried therein; but our particular White, the one who made Selborne notable among the villages of England, lies outside in the churchyard, near the north wall of the chancel, the grave being marked by a half-sunken headstone on which one reads with difficulty two simple letters, 'G. W.,' anda date, '26th June, 1793'; but a tablet within the church records at greater length his virtues and distinctions.

III

There is nothing more exhausting than the elegance of a big hotel; and to move from a fashionable caravansary in Philadelphia to another in London or Paris is to subject one's self to the inconvenience of travel, without enjoying any of its compensations. One wants to enjoy the difference of foreign countries rather than their somewhat artificial

resemblances. At the end of a busy day, when one is tired, one wants peace, quiet, and simplicity at least, this one does; and so, when our attention was called to a small apartment in Albemarle Street, from the balcony of which I could throw a stone into the windows of Quaritch's bookshop, in the event that such an act would afford any solution to the problem of securing the books I wanted, I closed the bargain instantly and was soon by way of being a householder on a very small scale.

We had been told that 'service' in England was a thing of the past, that it has disappeared with the war; but this was only one of the many discouraging statements which were to be entirely refuted in the experience. No one could have been better cared for than we, by a valet and maid who brushed our clothes and brought us our breakfast; and shortly after ten each morning we started out upon our wanderings in whatever direction we would, alert for any adventure that the streets of London might afford. This is an inexpensive and harmless occupation, interesting in the event and delightful in retrospect. Is it Liszt who conjures us to store up recollections for consumption in old age? Well, I am doing so.

I know not which I enjoy most, beating the pavements of the well-known streets, which afford at every turn scenes that recall some well-known historic or literary incident, or journeying into some unexplored region, which opens up districts of hitherto unsuspected interest. Years ago, when slumming first became fashionable, one never used to overlook Pettycoat Lane in far-off Whitechapel: of late years it has been cleaned up and made respectable and uninteresting. But how many people are there who know that there is a very pretty slum right in the heart of things, only a short distance back of Liberty's famous shop in Regent

Street? If interested in seeing how the other half lives, look it up when you are next in London, and you will be astonished at the way in which the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness unfolds itself in a maze of little streets and courts all jumbled together. London has always been a city in which extremes meet; where wealth impinges upon poverty. Nowhere can greater contrasts be obtained than in that terra incognita which lies just to the south of Soho. The world lives, if not in the open, at least in the streets; and food, fruit, fish, and furbelows are exposed for sale on barrows and trestles in what appears to be unspeakable confusion. I had discovered this curious slum. years before my friend Lucas, that sympathetic wanderer in London, called attention to it in his delightful volume, Adventures and Enthusiasms.

But there is to my mind an even choicer little backwater, just off Fleet Street-Nevill's Court, which I first visited many years ago, during a memorable midnight ramble in company with David Wallerstein, a Philadelphia lawyer and an old friend, who, by reason of his wide reading, retentive memory, and power of observation, seemed able to better my knowledge of London even in a district where I had thought myself peculiarly at home.

Nevill's Court runs east from Fetter Lane. One enters it by an archway, which may easily be passed unnoticed; and to one's great surprise one comes suddenly upon a row of old mansions, one of which was pointed out to me as once having been the town residence of the Earl of Warwick. 'It was a grand house in its day, sir,' said a young woman in an interesting condition, who was taking the air late one afternoon when I first saw it; 'but it's let out as lodgings now. Keir Hardie, M.P., lodges there when he's in London; he says he likes it here, it's so quiet.'

'And how long have you lived here?' I inquired.

'Oh, sir, I've always lived about 'ere in this court, or close to; I like living in courts, it's so quiet; it's most like living in the country.'

All the houses look out upon ample, if now sadly neglected, gardens, through the centre of which flower-bordered paths lead to the front doors. Push open one of the several gates, one is certain to be unlocked, or peer through the cracks of an old oaken fence which still affords some measure of the privacy dear to the heart of every Englishman, and you will see a bit of vanishing London which certainly can last but a short time longer. The roar of the city is quite unheard; one has simply passed out of the twentieth century into the seventeenth.

Oxford Street is to me one of the least interesting streets in London. It is a great modern thoroughfare, always crowded with people going east in the morning, and west in the evening when their day's work is done. I was walking along this street late one afternoon, when my eye caught a sign, 'Hanway Street,' which instantly brought to mind the publishing business conducted in it more than a century ago by my lamented friend, William Godwin. I hoped to learn that it was named after the discoverer of the umbrella, but it is not. Hanway Street is a mean, narrow passage running north out of Oxford Street, as if intent upon going straightway to Hampstead; but it almost immediately begins to wobble and, finally changing its mind, turns east and stops at the Horse-Shoe Tavern in the Tottenham Court Road.

My hour of refreshment having come, I stopped there, too, and over a mug of ale I thought of Godwin, and as a result of my meditations, decided to follow up the Godwin trail. And so, the inner man refreshed, I continued east through

Holborn until I came to Snowhill, to which street Godwin subsequently removed his business and his interesting family. Turning off to the left, and doubling somewhat on my tracks, I descended Snowhill, and found myself facing a substantial modern building, which challenged attention by reason of the rather unusual decoration of its façade. It needed but a glance to see that this building had been erected on the site of the Saracen's Head Inn, immortalized by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby. Let into the wall were two large panels, one being a school-scene bearing the legend 'Dothe boys Hall'; the other, a 'Mail Coach leaving Saracen's Head.' Over the arched doorway was a fine bust of Dickens, while to the left was a fulllength figure of the immortal Mr. Squeers, and on the right a similar figure of Nicholas Nickleby.

In the pleasure of my discovery I almost forgot all about Godwin, whose shop was once near-by; proving again, what needs no proof, that many characters in fiction are just as sure of immortality as persons who once moved among us in the flesh. Then I remembered that John Bunyan had lived and died in this street, when Snowhill was described as being very narrow, very steep, and very dangerous. This led me to decide that I would make a pilgrimage to Bunyan's tomb in Bunhill Fields, which I had not visited for many years.

And so, a few days later, I found myself wandering about in that most depressing graveyard, in which thousands of men and women, famous in their time, found sepulture-in some cases merely temporary, for the records show that, after the passing of fifteen years or so, their graves were violated to make room for later generations, all traces of earlier interments having been erased. Poor Blake and his wife are

among those whose graves can no longer be identified.

On the day of my visit it was much too damp to sit on the ground and tell sad stories of anything; but I had no difficulty in coming upon the tomb of Defoe, or that of Bunyan, a large altarlike affair, with his recumbent figure upon it. An old man whom I met loitering about called my attention to the fact that the nose had recently been broken off, and told me that it had been shot off by some soldier who had been quartered during the war in the near-by barracks of the Honorable Artillery Company. It appears that some miscreant had, to beguile the time, amused himself by taking pot shots at the statuary, and that much damage had been done before he was discovered. I think I shall accuse the Canadians of this act of vandalism. It is always well to be specific in making charges of this kind; moreover, it will grieve my talented friend, Tait McKenzie, the sculptor, who comes to us from Scotland by way of Toronto, and who thinks it a more grievous crime to mutilate a statue than to damage a man.

It will have been seen from the foregoing that I am the gentlest of explorers. Give me the choice of roaming the streets of London in search of a scarce first edition of, say, The Beggar's Opera, - so delightfully performed month after month at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, but which lasted scarcely a week in New York, - and a chance to explore some out-of-the-way country with an unpronounceable name, and my mind is made up in a moment. I have found the race with the sheriff sufficiently stimulating, and, on a holiday, give me the simple, or at least the contemplative, life.

Just before leaving home, I had lunched with my friend Fullerton Waldo; his face positively beamed with happiness and his eye sparkled. Why? Be

cause he was going to Russia to see for himself what the Bolsheviki were doing. 'You will see plenty of misery, you may be sure,' I replied. 'Why look at it? Why not let the Russians stew in their own juice? Ultimately they will come home, those that are left, wagging their tales behind them.'

But no, he wanted to see for himself. So we parted, each of us going his own way, and both happy.

But I did see one thing unusual enough to have interested even so sophisticated a traveler as Waldo, and that was the crowd which, on Armistice Day, that is to say, the eleventh of November, 1920, at exactly eleven o'clock in the morning, stood absolutely silent for two whole minutes. London is a busy city; there is a ceaseless ebb and flow of traffic, not in a few centres and here and there, as with us, but everywhere, and when this normal crowd is augmented by thousands from the country, intent upon seeing the dedication of the Cenotaph in the centre of Whitehall and the burial of the unknown warrior in the Abbey, it is a crowd of millions. And this huge crowd, at the first stroke of eleven, stood stock-still; not a thing moved, except, perhaps, here and there a horse turned its head, or a bird, wondering what had caused the great silence, fluttered down from Nelson's monument in Trafalgar Square. And so it was, we read, all over Britain, all over Australia and Africa, and a part of Asia and America: the great Empire, Ireland alone excepted, stood with bowed head in memory of the dead. Not a wheel turned anywhere, not a telegram or telephone message came over the wires.

These English know how to stage big effects, as befits their Empire; with them history is ever and always in the making. And when at last the bunting fluttered down from the Cenotaph, and when the bones of the Unknown, with

the King representing the nation as chief mourner, were deposited in the Abbey, there formed a procession which several days afterward, when I sought to join it, was still almost a mile long!

IV

London can boast of countless little museums, or memorials, to this or that great man; and it is soon to have another: Wentworth Place, in Hampstead, with which the name of Keats is so closely connected. When this is opened to the public, I have visited it privately, it is to be hoped that it will take on something of the kindly atmosphere of the Johnson House in Gough Square, rather than that of the cold museum dedicated to that old dyspeptic philosopher, Thomas Carlyle, in Chelsea. I remember well when he died. He was said to have been the Dr. Johnson of his time. Heaven keep us! Carlyle! who never had a good or kindly word to say of any man or thing; whose world, 'mostly fools,' bowed down before him and accepted his ravings as criticism; whose Prussian philosophy, 'the strong thing is the right thing,' was exploded in the great war. I have lived to see his fame grow dimmer day by day, while Johnson's grows brighter as his wit, wisdom, and, above all, his humanity, become better known and understood.

To Gough Square, then, I hastened, once I was comfortably installed in my little flat, to see if any of the suggestions I had made at a dinner given by Cecil Harmsworth, in the winter of 1914, to the Johnson Club, to which I was invited, had been carried out. The door was opened to my knock by an old lady who invited me in as if I were an expected guest. She explained that it was hoped that ultimately one room would be dedicated to the memory of Boswell and others of the Johnsonian

circle, Goldsmith, Garrick, Mrs. and in these interesting surroundings, Thrale, Fanny Burney, and the rest, and that the whole house would be pervaded by the immortal memory of Dr. Johnson, the kindest as well as the greatest of men; but that, owing to the war, not as much had been accomplished as had been hoped.

'And so,' I replied, 'my suggestions, have not been entirely forgotten. I had feared

'Why,' continued the old lady, 'can you be Mr. Newton of Philadelphia?'

I could have hugged her; for, gentle reader, this is much nearer fame than I ever hoped for. What a morning it was! Mrs. Dyble called for her daughter, and I was presented, and again found to be not unknown; and believe me, these two women were so absolutely steeped in Johnson as to shame my small learning and make me wish for the support of real honest-to-God Johnsonians, such as Tinker or Osgood, or my friend R. B. Adam, of Buffalo, who has the greatest Johnson collection in the world, and who, when next he goes to London, has a treat in store which will cause him to forget, at least momentarily, his charming wife and his young son; charming wives and young sons being not uncommon, whereas Gough Square is unique.

Any man of fine heart and substantial means could have bought the Gough Square house, but it required a singularly wise and modest man to fit it up so simply, so in keeping with the Johnsonian tradition; to say, 'We don't want a cold, dry-as-dust museum; we want the house to be as nearly as possible what it was when the great Doctor lived in it and compiled the dictionary in its attic room.' So it is, that 17 Gough Square, Fleet Street, is one of the places which it is a delight to visit. A fine Johnsonian library has been lent, and may ultimately be given, to the house; paintings, portraits, rare prints, and autograph letters abound;

friends, literary societies, and clubs may meet for the asking, and teas and dinners may be sent in from the nearby Cheshire Cheese. And all this might have been done, and yet the house might have lacked one of its greatest charms, namely, the kindly presence and hospitality of two women, the discovery of whom, by Mr. Harmsworth, was a piece of the rarest good fortune. Mrs. Dyble is a soldier's wife, her husband being a color sergeant in one of the crack regiments; and the story goes that, during the air-raids, when the Germans were dropping bombs on all and sundry, the old lady went, not into the 'tubes' for shelter, but, to meet the bombs half-way, into the attic; there, taking down a copy of Boswell, she read quite composedly through the night; for, as she said, she would not be worthy of her soldier husband if she were not prepared to face death at home as he was doing in France. But how long, I ask myself, will her daughter, Mrs. Rowell, a pretty widow, be content to live upon the memory of Dr. Johnson?

I was especially pleased to convey to the Johnson House a superb photograph of a portrait of Dr. Johnson by Reynolds, which had recently been acquired by Mr. John H. McFadden of Philadelphia. I was sitting in my club one afternoon, when Mr. McFadden came up and asked me how I would like to see a picture of Dr. Johnson which he had just received from the Agnews in London. Of course, I was delighted, and a few minutes later I was in the small but exquisite gallery of eighteenth-century portraits which Mr. McFadden has collected. Familiar as I am supposed to be with Johnson portraits, I had never seen the one which was shown me. It was obviously Dr. Johnand as soon as I returned home and had an opportunity of consulting my notes, I saw that it was the portrait

son;

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