gave the first suggestion of "Our Mutual Friend." At the end of the alley was a neat brick police-station; stairs led to the water, and several trim boats were moored there. Within the station I could see an officer quietly busy at his desk, as if he had been sitting there ever since Dickens described "the Night Inspector, with a pen and ink ruler, posting up his books in a whitewashed office as studiously as if he were in a monastery on the top of a mountain, and no howling fury of a drunken woman were banging herself against a cell-door in the back yard at his elbow." A handsome young fellow in uniform, who looked like a cross between a sailor and a constable, came out and asked very civilly if he could be of use to me. "Do you know," said I, "where the station was that Dickens describes in 'Our Mutual Friend'?"
"Oh, yes, sir! this is the very spot. It was the old building that stood just here: this is a new one, but it has been put up in the same place."
"Mr. Dickens often went out with your men in the boat, didn't he?"
"Yes, sir, many a night in the old times."
"Do you know the tavern which is described in the same book by the name of
The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters?"
"No, sir, I don't know it; at least not by that name. It may have been pulled down, for a lot of warehouses have been built along here, and the place is very much changed; or it may be one of those below."
Of course, I chose to think that it must be "one of those below." I kept on a little farther, by the crooked river lanes, where public houses were as plentiful as if the entire population suffered from a raging and inextinguishable thirst for beer. The sign-boards displayed a preference for the plural which seems not to have escaped the observation of the novelist. If I did not see The Six Porters, I came across The Three Mariners, The Three Cups, The Three Suns, The Three Tuns, The Three Foxes, and the Two Brewers; and in the last I hope that I found the original of the tavern so often mentioned in the story.
I had first noticed it from the steamboat—"a narrow, lop-sided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden veranda impending over the water,"—a tavern of dropsical appearance, which had not a straight floor in its whole constitution, and hardly a straight line. I got at the entrance on the land side after a search among puzzling alleys, and there I found still stronger reminders of "Our Mutual Friend." Stuck against the wall was an array of old and new hand-bills, headed, "Drowned," and offering rewards for the recovery of bodies. The value set upon dead persons in Limehouse Hole is not excessive: the customary recompense for finding them seems to be ten shillings, and in only one instance did the price reach the dazzling amount of one pound.
By the side of the house is an approach to the river: most of the buildings near are old and irregular, and at low tide a great deal of the shore must be exposed. Going upon the slippery stones, beside which lay a few idle and rickety boats, I found the expected range of windows with "red curtains matching the noses of the regular customers." I looked in at the door. A long passage opened a vista of pleasant bar-parlor, or whatever it may have been, on the river-side; and, perhaps, I should have seen Miss Abbey Potterson if I had gone to the end. Several water-side characters were drinking beer at the lead-covered counter, waited upon by a sharp young woman, who seems to have replaced Bob Gliddery. Instead of the little room called "Cozy," where the Police Inspector drank burned sherry with Lightwood and Wrayburn, there was an apartment labelled "The Club." A party of "regular customers," all evidently connected with water (or mud), sat around a table: beyond question they were Tootle, and Mullins, and Bob Glamour, and Captain Joey; and at ten o'clock Miss Abbey would issue from the bar-parlor, and send them home. If The Jolly Fellowship Porters is still extant, this must be it.
1 From "A Pickwickian Pilgrimage." The persons mentioned in Mr. Hassard's account of Limehouse Hole will be recognized as characters in the novels of Charles Dickens. By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1881.
WHITEHALL
By Augustus J.C. Hare
The present Banqueting-House of Whitehall was begun by Inigo Jones, and completed in 1622, forming only the central portion of one wing in his immense design for a new palace, which, if completed, would have been the finest in the world. The masonry is by a master-mason, Nicholas Stone, several of whose works we have seen in other parts of London. "Little did James think that he was raising a pile from which his son was to step from the throne to a scaffold." The plan of Inigo Jones would have covered 24 acres, and one may best judge of its intended size by comparison with other buildings. Hampton Court covers 8 acres; St. James's Palace, 4 acres; Buckingham Palace, 2–½ acres. It would have been as large as Versailles, and larger than the Louvre. Inigo Jones received only 8s. 4d. a day while he was employed at Whitehall, and £46 per annum for house-rent. The huge palace always remained unfinished.
Whitehall attained its greatest splendor in the reign of Charles I. The mask of Comus was one of the plays acted here before the king; but Charles was so afraid of the pictures in the Banqueting-House being injured by the number of wax lights which were used, that he built for the purpose a boarded room called the "King's Masking-House," afterward destroyed by the Parliament. The gallery toward Privy Garden was used for the king's collection of pictures, afterward either sold or burned. The Banqueting-House was the scene of hospitalities almost boundless.
The different accounts of Charles I.'s execution introduce us to several names of the rooms in the old palace. We are able to follow him through the whole of the last scenes of the 30th of January, 1648. When he arrived, having walked from St. James's, "the King went up the stairs leading to the Long Gallery" of Henry VIII, and so to the west side of the palace. In the "Horn Chamber" he was given up to the officers who held the warrant for his execution. Then he passed on to the "Cabinet Chamber," looking upon Privy Garden. Here, the scaffold not being ready, he prayed and conversed with Bishop Juxon, ate some bread, and drank some claret. Several of the Puritan clergy knocked at the door and offered to pray with him, but he said that they had prayed against him too often for him to wish to pray with them in his last moments. Meanwhile, in a small distant room, Cromwell was signing the order to the executioner, and workmen were employed in breaking a passage through the west wall of the Banqueting House, that the warrant for the execution might be carried out which ordained it to be held "in the open street before Whitehall.". …
Almost from the time of Charles's execution Cromwell occupied rooms in the Cockpit, where the Treasury is now, but soon after he was installed "Lord Protector of the Commonwealth" (December 16, 1653), he took up his abode in the royal apartments, with his "Lady Protectress" and his family. Cromwell's puritanical tastes did not make him averse to the luxury he found there, and, when Evelyn visited Whitehall after a long interval in 1656, he found it "very glorious and well furnished." But the Protectress could not give up her habits of nimble housewifery, and "employed a surveyor to make her some little labyrinths and trap-stairs, by which she might, at all times, unseen, pass to and fro, and come unawares upon her servants, and keep them vigilant in their places and honest in the discharge thereof." With Cromwell in Whitehall lived Milton, as his Latin Secretary. Here the Protector's daughters, Mrs. Rich and Mrs. Claypole, were married, and here Oliver Cromwell died (September 3, 1658) while a great storm was raging which tore up the finest elms in the Park, and hurled them to the ground, beneath the northern windows of the palace.
In the words of Hume, Cromwell upon his deathbed "assumed more the character of a mediator, interceding for his people, than that of a criminal, whose atrocious violation of social duty had, from every tribunal, human and divine, merited the severest vengeance." Having inquired of Godwin, the divine who attended him, whether a person who had once been in
