The Press. — London, England, 1855-02-24 00:00:00

168 flitraturt. Curiosities of London. Exhibiting the most Rare and Remarkable Objects of Interest in the Metropolis. With nearly Fifty Years' Personal Recollections. By John Timbs. London : Bogue. THE title of this book hardly does justice to its contents. "We took a ramble together," writes Addison, in one of those pleasant papers condemned to indifference by the witty sar casm of Steele, " We took a ramble together to " see the curiosities of this great town." But the Freeholder did not mean that he and his friend took a ramble together to read the his tory of London, or explore its institutions. Mr. Timbs should have adopted a more com prehensive title to express the variety and extent of the materials he has collected ; for, although the volume falls short of being as complete as it might have been rendered, it undoubtedly embraces a wider range of infor mation than can be properly included under the exceptional term, " curiosities." " Twenty-seven years since," says Mr. Timbs, " I wrote in the parlour of the house " No. 3, Charing-cross (then a publisher's), the " title and plan of a volume to be called " Curiosities of London ; and the work here " submitted to the public is the realisation of " that design." This little anecdote might have been improved by the addition of the fact that in a house exactly opposite to that in which Mr. Timbs suggested his project, Milian, the publisher, a hundred years before, launched the project of the " Seasons ;" and that it was in the room over Millan's shop Thomson wrote the chief part of " Winter," which, after being offered in vain to other booksellers, Millen was induced at last to purchase for the sum of five guineas. The neighbourhood of Charing-cross is storied groun, and presents an excellent starting-point for a collector of metropolitan memoribilia. Close at hand Verrio was housed by the King, and at a short distance was the Aviary, whose keeper be queathed his name to Storey's-gate ; here, also, nearer to Pall-mall, was the mews for the King's hawks, from whence the term has come down to us in a different application ; not far off was the last Maypole seen in the streets of London ; and the whole of the surrounding district, starred over with coffee-houses, tilt grounds, cockpits, tennis-courts, and bowling greens, bears an inexhaustible harvest of tra ditions. No other city in the world is so rich in re collections as London. It hail an existence before what is called the Roman period, and enjoyed the distinction of a name, not noted in this volume, before it received the appella tions of Londinium or Augusta. Its remote history is an integral and important part of the early history of the kingdom, and its progress through centuries of change to its present magnitude, comprising a population conside rably exceeding that of some of the small States of Europe, represents every phase of the general progress in arts, commerce, litera ture, and government. The rapidity of its Frowth, and the circumstances connected with its constant extension, indicate an infinite variety of points of interest, marking the course and development of the national power. Upon its monuments are inscribed the vicissi tudes of successive dynasties, and in its archives are to be traced the origin and strut ture of nearly all our civil and political insti tutions. A survey of its living features would be of little value beyond that of a mere street directory, unless it also comprehended the features of the past ; nor can its actual condi tion at any period be rendered thoroughly in telligible without reference to its former aspects and historical antecedents. To be enabled to estimate trtily its present state, we must be shown how this " great town" grew up and accumulated ; how the transitions of habits and the intermixture of races modified from time to time its social characteristics; how the conquests of science, and the adapta• tion of the useful arts to the revolutions of civilisation, influenced its destinies; and by what means, and through what channels of discovery and i m p ro vement, the energies of THE PRESS. the people ultimately contributed to the for mation of that vast human hive which excites even more wonder in the denizen who is most I familiar with its marvels, than in the stranger who treads its mazes with bated breath and bewildered eyes. The sources from whence this kind of information may be drawn are ample and accessible. Chronicles and statistical tables, legends and ballads, fugitive tracts, registers and records of every conceivable de scription are to be had in abundance ; and there is no reason why a book upon London should not be full and satisfactory. Yet, al though a multitude of such volumes have been compiled, and the tempting theme has attracted the labours of many competent men, the history of London, social, civil, and politi cal, remains yet to be written. We are at no loss for descriptive-books, guide-books, and books into which antiquarian details, and incidental particulars, personal, literary, and picturesque, have been poured with liberality and profusion ; but a book based upon syste matic researches, and working out the phi losophy of the subject, is still a desideratum. Mr. Timbs' -volume does not profess to aim at any higher object than that of bringing together a miscellaneous collection of local facts and illustrations ; and it is not, therefore, to be tried by the standard we have suggested. The book is creditable to the toil that has been bestowed upon it ; but this acknowledg ment must be accompanied by an expression of regret that the toil visible in the compila tion of materials was not guided by a sounder judgment in the use made of them. The work is a striking example of industry without method, exhibiting elaborate means employed upon the production of insufficient results. The plan of the book is not clear. The form is alphabetical ; but a subdivision into classes, not in themselves very definite, perplexes the reader in his pursuit of particular trains of information. An index is added to assist him out of his difficulties ; but here ho discovers that the facts he is in search of are frequently scattered over different places, so that he must combine them into a whole for himself. These objections apply to the plan generally. On the other hand, when the facts supplied are sufficiently grouped together to become available as far as they go, they are for the most part so slightly treated as to be useful only for the purposes of cursory inquiry. If a larger view be required of the history of lo calities, or of those popular elements which impart vitality to local history, it must be sought elsewhere. The principal object of the volume is to pre sent rapid and succinct outlines of existing erections and institutions. In this direction lies its chief success, although these matters are not investigated fully, nor with any attempt at sym metry in the proportions assigned to the several topics. Mr. Timbs appears to have given the greatest space to the subjects with which he was best acquainted, rather than to the sub jects which were best entitled to expansion. Nevertheless, in spite of a defective plan, and a somewhat capricious mode of treatment, the volume is, upon the whole, one of the most valuable, and certainly one of the most care ful and painstaking, of its class. It contains a great mass of desultory facts ; it bears almost in every page the fruits of discursive reading and indefatigable research; and, if we look in vain for many things essential to complete ness, we also find in it much that is curious, interesting, and new. The manifest defect of the work is in the historical part. Here we are tantalised by omissions or scanty allusions, and constantly disappointed by the deficiency of data and ex planatory details. The early foundations are dismissed with brevity, while the modern in stitutions which have sprung out of them are sometimes enlarged upon with vexatious pro lixity. We seldom catch the colours of the ages that are past, and are nowhere able to fix the vanishing tints of habits and manners. The social history, in which is concentrated so much of the charm, and, in a still higher point of view, the utility of such works, is very meagrely dealt with. When it was thought worth while to inform the reader that he can dine at a table dkOte at Billingsgate on three kinds of fish, with meat, &c., for one shilling and sixpence, room might SATURDAY, have been found for some account of the Dark House, which was one of its conspicuous features at no very remote date. A paragraph is properly given to the Folly on the Thames ; but nothing is said of the Tilt Boat at Gravesend, an equally remarkable illustration of the usages of the time. Having gone out of town so far as Dulwich for a description of Alleyn's College and the Picture Gallery, a glance down the river could not be considered foreign to the main objects of the book. Of Taylor, the water-poet, we are told that he knew Ben Jonson, to which is added Mr. Knight's ingenious conjecture that he "pro " bably had the good fortune to ferry Shak " speexe from Whitehall to Paris Garden." If Taylor deserved the distinction of being pre= served amongst the few worthies of the river embalmed in these pages, the least he was en titled to was to be chronicled somewhat more accurately. Under the head of " Coffee houses " we have a catalogue as short of the demands of the subject as if a compiler were to cluster together some half-dozen chapels of ease, and call it an account of the churches of London. There is hardly a single aspect of the life of London so crowded with materials of interest ; but the history of the coffee houses is wholly ignored, and the space given up almost exclusively to an enumeration of some of the principal establishments of that kind now existing. We find no record of the chocolate-houses that preceded them, or of the still earlier ordinaries so prominent in the literary and social annals of the days of Nash, Peale, and. Green. Upon the taverns of the metropolis, the haunts of generations of celebrities, the book is silent. A section is devoted to amusements, and, although cock fighting, and fireworks, and hear-baiting, and duck-hunting, and bowls, and cricket, are duly registered, the details are brief, and fail either to mark the chronology of popular pastimes, which is indispensable as the stamp of their historical value, or to suggest any considera tions concerning the relation between the pleasures of the people and the progress of taste and knowledge. It is unnecessary to indicate how much more might have been done to render this chapter both instructive and entertaining. What might have been said, for example, about the royal frivolities of Whitehall under the Restoration, the games, and tricks, and childish fancies, in which Ministers and maids of honour were mixed up in a braid of romps and cross-questions, such as " Hunt the slipper," and " I love my " love with an A"? Card playing, we are in formed, was early a favorite pastime with the Londoners ; but we are left to till up the outline as we best may. Not a word about Gleek, so famous in the comedies of the seventeenth century; or of Ombre, immortalised by Pope; or of the gambling excesses to which even ladies committed themselves, and which were lashed by Suckling and Sedley, and formed a frequent topic of satire in the prologues and epilogues. Of lotteries, the shame of the palace at one period, and the vice of the com monalty at another, we find no account in these pages. The places of resort, garden. a, promenades, public walks, are dismissed with notices so scanty that a foreigner could never gather from the book the slightest notion of the importance once attached to these scenes. " Here, too," says Mr. Timbs, speaking of Goring-house, the site of Buckingham Palace, " was a grove of mulberry trees, planted bz " James 1., afterwards the Mulberry Garden. And this is all we learn of that famous mul berry garden to which Sedley dedicated a comedy, and to which a thousand all usions ar © made in the plays of the period—a spot familiar to us in the diary of Pepys, and in that well-known anecdote which brings Dryden before us, as in a picture , eating tar . tarts in an arbour with Madame Reeve. The absurd fabrication about Dryden's funeral, long since disproved, is, we Are surprised to see, admitted here as a piece of veritable .bio graphy. The curi os ity- s hops of the metropolis have a niche to themselve s ; but we find, 0?- thing about the china-shops, which in the . ir day played a much more prominent paxt the inner life of London intrigue and licen tiousness. The railway termini of the metro polis, no doubt very us eful information, are described, and the hackney-coaches and cabs