The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of the "Ingoldsby Legends". Charles G. Harper
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OLD FISH STREET HILL, CITY OF LONDON, AFTER THE FIRE OF DECEMBER 1886.
The dying man—for the truth could be no longer disguised—kept a spirit of the supremest cheerfulness and Christian courage. His humorous verses on the incidents of his distressing illness—originally composed as replies to the inquiries of anxious friends and afterwards published in the collection of Ingoldsby Lyrics as "The Bulletin," are no whit inferior to the productions of his careless health.
When recovery at Clifton seemed hopeless, he was removed again to London, to the house he had occupied for the last six years, and made a grim joke as they assisted him into the house, on the appropriateness of his being brought at that juncture to Amen Corner. A few days he lay there, life ebbing away from sheer weakness; his mind still clear, and divided between making the most careful disposition of his property and fond memories of that "little boy Ned" who had died, untimely, some years before. It was then he wrote that last poem, the beautiful "As I Laye a-thynkynge," printed at the end of all editions of the Ingoldsby Legends as "The Last Lines of Thomas Ingoldsby." There is not, to my mind, anything more exquisitely beautiful and pathetic in the gorgeous roll of English literature than the seven stanzas of the swan-song of this master of humour and pathos. It is wholly for themselves, and not by reason of reading into them the special circumstances under which they were written, that so sweeping a judgment is made. That they have never been properly recognised is due to the Wardour Street antiquity of their spelling, and still more to that strange insistence which ordains that the accepted wit and humourist must always be "funny" or go unacknowledged. It is a strange penalty; one that would seek to deprive the humourist of all human emotions save that of laughter, and so make him that reproach of honest men—a cynic.
It was on June 17th, 1845, that Barham died, untimely, before the completion of his fifty-seventh year. He was buried in the vaults of his former church, St. Mary Magdalene, Old Fish Street Hill, one of those half-deserted city churches built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London. There he might have lain until now, but for the fire of December 2nd, 1886, which destroyed the building. For at least four years the blackened and roofless ruins stood, fronting Knightrider Street, and then they were removed, to make way for warehouses. The contents of the vaults were at the same time dispersed, the remains of Tom Ingoldsby being removed to Kensal Green Cemetery, while the tablet to his memory was appropriately transferred to St. Paul's, where, in the crypt, it may still be seen.
CHAPTER III
CANTERBURY
There stands a city, neither large nor small,
Its air and situation sweet and pretty.
It matters very little, if at all,
Whether its denizens are dull or witty;
Whether the ladies there are short or tall,
Brunettes or blondes; only, there stands a city!
Perhaps 'tis also requisite to minute,
That there's a Castle and a Cobbler in it.
Thus wrote Ingoldsby of his native city of Canterbury, in "The Ghost," and "sweet and pretty" its air and situation remain, sixty years since those lines were penned. For the changes that have altered so many other cities and towns have brought little disturbance here. No manufactures have come to abolish the prettiness of the situation; the air—the atmospheric air—is sweet and fragrant as of yore, and that other air—the demeanour and deportment—of Canterbury is still, as ever, gravely cheerful, as surely befits the capital city of a Primate whose Church is still a going concern.
Ingoldsby was exactly right in his epithetical summing-up, for prettiness and not grandeur is the characteristic of the gentle valley of the Stour, wherein Canterbury is set. Approach it from whatever quarter you will, and you will find prettiness only in the situation. Even when viewed from the commanding heights of Harbledown and St. Thomas's Hill, the only grandeur is that of the Cathedral, and that is extrinsic, a something imported into the picture. Nay, even the uprising bulk of that cathedral church gains in effect from being thus set down in midst of a valley that is almost with equal justness called a plain, and whose features may, without offence, or the suspicion of any thought derogatory from their beauty, be termed so featureless.
Unquestionably the best direction whence to enter this ancient capital of the Kentish folk—this Kaintware-bury of the Saxons, the Durovernum of the Romans—is from Harbledown, whence the pilgrims from London, or from the north and west of England, entered. Only thus does the stranger receive a really accurate impression. With emotions doubtless less violent than those of the mediæval pilgrims to the shrine of the blessed martyr, St. Thomas, but still strongly aroused, he sees the west front of the Cathedral, its two western "towers," and the great central "Bell-Harry" tower displayed boldly before him, in the level, and may even identify the more prominent of the public buildings. Descending from this hill, he passes through the ancient suburb of Saint Dunstan, and enters the city beneath the frowning portals of the West Gate.
If, on the other hand, the modern pilgrim arrives per Chatham and Dover Railway, he will be dumped down in quite a different direction, on the south side of the city, near Wincheap Street, in which thoroughfare he will be able, without any delay, to discover his first Ingoldsby landmark in Canterbury, in the shape of the "Harris's Almshouses," founded in 1729 by that ancestral Harris whose daughter his great-grandfather had married. They are five quite humble little red-brick houses, with a garden at the back, endowed for the support of two poor parishioners of St. Mary Magdalene, two of Thanington, and one of St. Mildred's. The value is the modest one of about £9 a year. An unassuming tablet on the central house of the row tells this story:
Mr. Thomas Harris
of this City
Founder of these Five
Alms-Houses
hath endowed them with
Marly Farm in Kent
for the Maintenance of five
Poor Familys for ever.
Ingoldsby—the Reverend Richard Harris Barham—became a governor of this charity on his attaining his majority, as already alluded to in the sketch of his birth and career.
The district of Wincheap only becomes tolerable after leaving the railway behind. This outlying part, without the city walls, was of old that place of degradation where the scourgings and stripes, the whips and scorpions of mediæval punishments, were inflicted; where offending books—ay, and the horror of it, the Protestant martyrs—were burnt of yore. In this "Potter's Field" that is not now more than a struggling little suburb where all the littlenesses of life are prominent, and few of its beauties are to be seen, there has of late been erected a great granite memorial pillar, surmounted by the "Canterbury Cross," on the site of the stake at which forty-one victims of the Marian persecution perished. Shackle and stake, faggot and gyve, rivet and torch, how busy they were! It is a beautiful sentiment that rears this monument on the spot where they suffered who testified for Jesus; but it should stand, plain for all men to see, in the Cathedral Close itself.
Our course from this point into the city leads up to the Castle, mentioned in the Legends, and especially in that early one, "The Ghost," in whose stanzas are found many exquisitely apposite local Canterbury touches. That Castle is, in its secular way, as interesting as the Cathedral in its ecclesiastical:
The Castle was a huge and antique mound,
Proof against all the artillery of the quiver,
Ere those abominable guns were found,
To send cold lead through gallant warrior's liver.
It stands upon a gently-rising ground,
Sloping down gradually to the river,
Resembling (to compare great things with smaller)
A well-scoop'd, mouldy Stilton cheese—but taller.
The Keep, I