Chapter V: Part 5

Then the dancing began. At first it was a stately dance called the _Brantle_, in which the couples followed one another round the room, keeping step to the music.

“That’s the Duke of Monmouth bowing low to Lady Castlemaine,” Godmother said, seeing that Betty was watching a very handsome young man whose partner was a pretty lady in a wonderful gown of blue and silver. “You will read about his tragic end in your history. But now he is young and gay and in high favour with the King.”

“Look! the King and a lady are dancing alone!” cried Betty. “Doesn’t he dance well?”

“That dance is called a _Coranto_. You see that every one in the room stands up when the King dances. There! He is calling to the musicians for a merrier tune, and now we shall see a country dance, very different from these stately measures.”

In a moment or two indeed the whole gay throng was jigging to a lively air such as Betty had heard the fiddler play for the milkmaids in Drury Lane.

“It’s a Morris dance,” she exclaimed. “We learn it at school.”

“Yes, there’s a fashion in our day to bring back the old-fashioned country dances that were common in England two or three hundred years ago. See how the King is enjoying it,” she added. “You can understand why, in spite of his failings as a ruler, he is so popular with his subjects. They love his free and easy ways, and his lazy good-nature.”

“I suppose Mr. Pepys will write about this ball?” Betty suggested.

“Oh yes. The ‘Diary’ says, ‘_Mr. Povey and I to Whitehall: he taking me thither on purpose to carry me into the ball this night before the King_,’ and a few lines further on we read, ‘_Then to country dances; the King leading the first, which he called for_.’”

“And we’ve actually seen him do it!” Betty exclaimed.

But almost before she finished speaking, a thick mist swallowed up the ball-room with its sparkling lights and its whirling men and women.... The sun was shining, and they were once more in the open air.

“We are in the Chepe now,” Betty said, recognizing it immediately, for it had scarcely changed at all since the reign of Elizabeth.

It was decorated now in honour of May Day. Scarlet hangings draped the front of the houses not only of the market-place itself, but of those in the narrow streets leading from it. Wood Street, a dirty dark lane overhung by its picturesque wooden dwellings, was especially gay, Betty noticed. It was full of life and bustle. At every doorway people stood talking and laughing, and where the top stories almost met overhead, she noticed children leaning from the windows to exchange handfuls of flowers with little opposite neighbours who could reach them easily.

“Now,” said Godmother, “that we have seen London gay and merry on this May Day in the early part of Charles the Second’s reign, I’m afraid you must have just a glimpse of the city a few years later in terrible trouble. Shut your eyes.”

Betty obeyed, and when after a moment Godmother said, “Open them,” she looked round her in horror. They were standing on the same spot in the Chepe, for there was the entrance to Wood Street, just opposite. But what was this terrible change? The Chepe was silent and deserted. Grass was growing between the cobblestones with which it was paved, and the only creature in sight, was a man walking beside a covered cart ringing a bell. What was he repeating in that hoarse voice of his? She listened and with a shudder heard the words, “_Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!_”

“We will walk a few steps down Wood Street,” Godmother said.

Betty followed her along the narrow lane. The doors of the houses were all closed. No groups of gossiping people stood there now, and there were no laughing children high above, throwing flowers to one another. On almost every other door Betty saw a red cross drawn in chalk, and beneath it was scrawled _God have mercie upon us_. The air was full of the sound of tolling bells.

“Oh! how dreadful!” she cried. But the words were uttered in Godmother’s parlour, and she was thankful to be whisked so suddenly into her own day.

“The Plague was in London then, I suppose?” she asked.

“Yes. A moment ago, we were in the year 1665, and the Chepe, and Wood Street, showed you the terrible state of things that existed then all over the city. Nearly all the richer people had left London by the time we had that glimpse of only one of the streets in which the disease raged. The Court had moved from Whitehall; most of the clergy had run away. So had many of the doctors. The people died by thousands, and still in those narrow dirty streets the plague spread. Trade was at a standstill, and multitudes were starving, and only kept alive by money sent for their relief to the Lord Mayor and the Archbishop and two or three noblemen who bravely refused to desert the city.”

“Did Mr. Pepys go away?” Betty asked with interest.

“No. His work kept him in London nearly all the time, and of course he tells us much about this awful year. Let us look at his ‘Diary.’”

She opened the book which had been responsible for the magic scenes Betty had already beheld, and began to turn the leaves.

“Here,” she said, “on June 7th, 1665, long before the terrible disease had reached its height, Mr. Pepys wrote, ‘_The hottest day that ever I felt in my life. This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and Lord have mercy upon us writ there._’ But though Pepys owns that he is often afraid, he keeps quite calm, and does not forget to mention when he puts on new clothes. (He is very vain, you know, and fond of dress.)

“On September 3rd, when the plague was at its height, this is what appears in his ‘Diary’: ‘_Up; and put on my coloured silk suit very fine_.’ He goes on to say how he dares not put on his new ‘periwigg’ (that is the sort of long curling wig we saw him wearing just now) because he thinks it might hold the infection. Still Mr. Pepys was no coward during this terrible time, and seems to have done what he could to help the poor. Well, we will not linger over the misery of London during that awful year of 1665. A hundred thousand Londoners died of it, and even before it was quite over, another terrible misfortune fell upon the poor city, of which you shall just have a second’s glimpse. Hold this book. Shut your eyes, and think yourself on Bankside in Southwark, near St. Saviour’s Church.”

Betty had no sooner done this, than even before she opened her eyes she was conscious of a fierce glare. Then just for a flashing second she saw on the opposite side of the river, London burning. From the Tower on the right hand, across the river, to St. Paul’s far down on the left, the city was a sheet of flame, and the night sky overhead was deep crimson with the reflected glare!

Before she had time to feel frightened she was in the quiet parlour where Godmother still sat, turning over the leaves of the “Diary.”

“How wonderful, but _awful_ it looked, Godmother! I couldn’t have borne to see it a second longer. What does it say about it in Mr. Pepys’s book?”

“He describes the Fire very fully. He tells how at three o’clock on Sunday morning, Jane, the maid, called him up, saying there was a big blaze near them. But it is some hours later before he understands that this is something more than an ordinary fire. Then he goes to the Tower, and from one of the roofs there, sees all the wharves and quays and the houses in Thames Street (Chaucer’s street, you remember,) in a blaze. The houses on London Bridge were beginning to burn also. He tells of the scenes on the river where the people were rushing from their blazing houses on the bank and crowding into boats carrying all they could snatch up in their flight, ‘_poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them_,’ he writes, ‘_and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceived were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they burned their wings and fell down._’”

“We went down one of those very stairs on to the quay when we saw the sailor man telling the boys of his travels—in Queen Elizabeth’s days,” interrupted Betty. “And I remember the pigeons were flying about then! Do go on, Godmother.”

“Well, then Pepys goes on to say he takes a boat and rows down the river to Whitehall and informs the King and the Duke of York (afterwards, you know, James the Second) that this fire is very serious. So the King orders him to tell the Lord Mayor to have houses pulled down as fast as he can, to stop the flames, if possible, by making big gaps in the streets. For the wooden houses were burning furiously, as you saw just now, and the fire leapt from one to another. Soldiers were sent to help in this work, but all in vain, for fiery flakes were carried by the wind and fell on other roofs which began to blaze. Then he describes the streets blocked with carts in which furniture and treasures were stacked, and thronged also with escaping people, crying and lamenting. In Cannon Street he meets the distracted Lord Mayor who exclaims, ‘_Lord! what can I do?... I have been pulling down houses, but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it._’

“The same night, Pepys and his wife and some friends took a boat at Whitehall steps and rowed downstream towards the Tower, meeting hundreds of boats loaded with people escaping with their treasures, and seeing furniture and household goods floating about in the water. As they drew nearer to London Bridge, the heat from streets of flaming buildings was so great that they were obliged to land on Bankside opposite. There, from a little inn, they watched London burning, as you saw it just now. When he reached home he wrote in his ‘Diary’ that as it grew darker, the fire appeared more and more ‘_and in corners, and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire_.’ At last it seemed ‘_as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruine._’”

“That was as I saw it!” cried Betty. “Was his house burnt? Because Seething Lane isn’t far from London Bridge.”

“No. It was in great danger, but it escaped. For two or three days after that Sunday, Pepys worked hard removing his treasures to a friend’s house at a distance, and burying his wine and important papers belonging to the Admiralty in a hole he dug in his garden. All that time London burnt, and the wildest scenes of confusion went on all round him, as the flames, helped by a strong wind, spread farther and farther. For nearly a week it raged, and when at last it was stopped in Smithfield——”

“At Pie Corner,” interrupted Betty.

Godmother smiled. “No child will ever forget that the fire began in Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner!” she remarked. “Well, when at last it was stopped, nearly the whole of London as it then existed, was in ruins, and two hundred thousand people were homeless.”

“Whatever became of them, poor things?”

“Thousands of them camped out in tents and huts, on what were then _real_ fields in Moorfields, outside Moorgate (then a _real_ gate in the City wall). But before we learn what became of them later, let us flash back for a moment or two and look at the city in ruins. It will be a sad sight, but we shall understand London better if we see it.”

The magic rite with the ‘Diary’ was once more performed, and in a flash they found themselves standing near one of the wharves close to London Bridge, on to which Mr. Samuel Pepys was just stepping from a boat. He was richly and trimly dressed as usual (having got over the fright of the Fire), and his face was full of importance and curiosity.

“He is going to look at the ruins,” Godmother said. “Let us follow him.”

Their unconscious guide led them over mounds of hot ashes into Cheapside.

“Oh, Godmother, the beautiful Chepe! All in ruins!” cried Betty. A moment later she saw what had been the Exchange, and was now nothing but a blackened skeleton. Mr. Pepys was standing before its remains, looking from the heaps of broken statues on the ground to one still standing, upon which he gazed in astonishment.

“It’s the statue of its founder, Sir Thomas Gresham—the only one on the building not burnt, strangely enough,” Godmother said.

“Oh! that’s St. Paul’s; with the roof all fallen in. Scarcely any of it left,” Betty exclaimed sorrowfully.

“_A miserable sight, my Lord!_” she heard Mr. Pepys remark with a low bow to a gentleman who stood near him among the crowd of dejected sightseers.

“The old Grey Friars’ church is gone, you notice,” Godmother said. “This, you remember, was Christ’s Hospital—the Blue Coat School, now all in ruins. Acres of streets and houses are destroyed, with more than eighty churches and an enormous number of schools and hospitals and public buildings of all sorts. In fact, old London, as you see, has practically vanished.”

“It’s too sad,” sighed Betty, looking round her at the ruin and desolation. “I don’t want to see any more. Look at those people crying. I suppose that heap of rubbish was their home?... Do let us go back to our own time, Godmother!”

In another flash they were there, and Betty, as usual when she returned so mysteriously to everyday life, rubbed her eyes.

“Poor London!” she sighed. “First the Plague, and then that awful Fire. I should think it was the worst fire that ever happened to a city, wasn’t it?”

“One of the worst, certainly. But out of the evil came one good at least. London has never since been visited by that dreadful Plague which before the Fire was always hovering in its narrow lanes ready to break out violently at intervals. In sweeping away the picturesque buildings, many of which had been standing for hundreds of years, it also swept the city free of the poisonous germs in it, which had never before died out. The new houses were healthier, many of the streets were made broader. There was air and light where formerly there had been stuffy darkness. And light and air are the good spirits that drive away the demons of disease.”

“But how did London ever get built again? I can’t think how ever the people found homes once more?”

“There was terrible suffering, of course, but they were brave and energetic. They did not sit down and cry for long, but helped by money from the rich, they began to build their city again. The part by the riverside that was needed for shipping and trade of all kinds, rose first out of the ashes, and then by degrees new churches and mansions, and public buildings arose on the ruins of the old. You must remember one man in particular who lived at this time, because it was he who designed most of the new churches and a great many of the public buildings. His name was Sir Christopher Wren.”

“Oh! It was Sir Christopher Wren who built the new St. Paul’s, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, and many of the other London churches we see every day. After the Great Fire, when most of the city was in ruins, it was at first proposed to rebuild it in an altogether different way, and Sir Christopher Wren was asked to prepare a plan for New London. If it had been built according to his drawing, we should see a very different London now. It would be a _regular_ city, with broad streets all more or less similar, running parallel to one another; rather like modern Paris or New York.”

“But it isn’t a bit like that, is it? There are lots of little curly streets and narrow lanes in the city in our own time,” said Betty.

“That’s because the people couldn’t wait to build till all these new arrangements were settled. They began putting up their new houses in the same places, following the lines of the old streets.”

“I’m so glad they did,” Betty remarked. “Because at least you can tell now exactly where the old places stood. It wouldn’t have been interesting to have a perfectly different city.”

“Well, it has stopped raining now,” said Godmother as a gleam of sunshine lighted her pretty parlour. “Shall we go to Whitehall and look at the only part of the Palace that is left?”

“Oh yes. I want to hear what happened to it after Charles the Second’s time. It wasn’t burnt, of course, because the Great Fire didn’t reach so far as Whitehall.”

“Not in the Great Fire certainly, but it _was_ burnt down only about thirty years later, in the reign of William and Mary. Afterwards St. James’s Palace, which you know well by sight, was the London home of royalty till Buckingham Palace took its place.”

In less than half an hour, they were driving from Westminster up Whitehall, and the car stopped before that building opposite the Horse Guards which is now called the United Service Museum.

“The famous Banqueting Hall has been turned into a museum, you see, where all sorts of interesting relics connected with the Army and Navy are preserved. We’ll go in and look at it,” said Godmother.

They went upstairs into the lofty hall, and Betty gazed up at the painted ceiling high above her head and at the flags hanging in a line just below it.

“The ceiling is the work of Rubens, a famous Dutch painter, and the old flags hanging up there once belonged either to famous ships or famous regiments. Now come and look at this model of Whitehall Palace as you saw it half an hour ago.”

Betty followed her eagerly to a glass case near the door.

“Oh, it’s a splendid model of it!” she exclaimed. “Here’s the part that went along by the river, where the Queen lived, and some of the beautiful ladies of the Court as well. And there are all the gabled houses round the big garden in the middle.”

“And that’s the building we’re standing in at the present moment,” Godmother added, pointing out the Banqueting Hall in the model. “The beginning of what the architect intended as a great new palace, and the only part of it either built or remaining now.”

“That’s where the Tilt Yard was,” Betty exclaimed, when having examined the model, she went to one of the big windows of the Hall and looked across at the Horse Guards, with the scarlet-coated soldiers on their horses standing on either side of the gateway. “And just under this window poor King Charles was beheaded.”

There were numberless interesting things besides the model to be seen in the Hall, but Betty’s mind was full of Restoration days, and when Godmother proposed that they should drive to the place where the Great Fire ended, she readily agreed.

“You know where it began, because you’ve been up the Monument at London Bridge, and that commemorates the place of its outbreak. We must go to Smithfield to find the spot where it was checked.”

“Close to the Charterhouse, then?” murmured Betty.

“There!” Godmother said presently, when they reached Smithfield from a turning out of Holborn. “The figure of that fat boy on the corner house of Cock Lane, then called _Pye Corner_, marks the place where the flames were at last quenched by pulling down houses to make an open space.”

“I wonder what the fat boy has to do with the Great Fire?” Betty said.

Godmother laughed. “There used to be an inscription under the figure to say that the Fire was caused by ‘the sin of gluttony.’ But that was probably only because ‘Pudding Lane’ and ‘Pie Corner’ suggested eating too much of either or both!” she explained.

“Is there anything in the London Museum about the time of Charles the Second?” Betty asked on the homeward drive.

“Yes. You’d better go there before next Saturday. You’ll find plenty to interest you, and to remind you of the terrible as well as of the charming things you’ve lately seen. Look for the placards that were posted up in the streets at the time of the Great Plague. One is headed ‘_Lord have mercy upon us_’ and gives some curious directions about the sort of medicine people should take to prevent infection. Then just above these old placards, you will see one of the very hand-bells that were tolled in the streets when men went round with the carts crying, ‘_Bring out your dead_.’ Go downstairs into the basement if you want to see a splendid model of London burning.”

“Burning?” echoed Betty in surprise.

“Yes, and very cleverly managed too, as you’ll discover. Look at all the other models while you’re in the basement part of the Museum. There’s one of old St. Paul’s as it appeared before the Fire, and as you saw it for the last time in the early years of Charles the Second’s reign.”

“London will be almost a new city the next time we see it,” remarked Betty. “I wonder whether I shall like it so well as the old one?”

“It will be different, certainly. And now, my dear, it’s getting so late that I’m going to drive you straight home.”

V

The Eighteenth Century

THE LONDON OF THE GEORGES AND OF DR. JOHNSON

“To-day we’re going to see London as it was after the Fire!” exclaimed Betty, when she had recovered as usual from her first astonishment and delight at “remembering everything” the moment she saw Godmother. “How are we going to get back this time?”

“Well, there’s a good deal we can see without ‘going back’ at all,” Godmother replied. “Because all that surrounds us every day _is_ London after the Fire. Many buildings exist now, just as they were put up when the city began to rise from its ashes in the latter part of Charles the Second’s reign.”

“Isn’t there to be any ‘magic’ at all to-day, then?” Betty’s voice was full of disappointment.

“Not just yet, at any rate. We are not going back quite so far into the Past this time. Only, in fact, about a hundred and fifty years—to the middle of the eighteenth century.”

“But London must have changed even in that time?”

“It has—enormously. Yet at the same time much remains the same, and I propose to show you first what is left in our own day of the end of the seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth centuries. It will only be necessary to employ magic in the case of certain places that have altogether vanished from the London of our own time. But before we go any further with or without magic, we must have our usual little history examination. So sit down and collect your thoughts.”

Betty obeyed with a good grace, for she knew she would find all she was about to see, ten times more interesting for not being “in a muddle” about her history.

“When we left London last time,” Godmother began, “Charles the Second was reigning. Who was the next king?”

“James the Second, his brother,” Betty said, after a moment’s thought.

“And then?”

“William and Mary.”

“Why didn’t the son of James the Second come to the throne?”

“Because there was a revolution, and the people chose James the Second’s son-in-law to be king, and he was William of Orange, who was married to James’s daughter, Mary.”

“Very good!” exclaimed Godmother approvingly. “Queen Anne, you remember, Mary’s sister, was the next sovereign. And after her?”

“Let me see. She had no children, so a relation of hers, a German man, was chosen. He was George the First. Then came George the Second, and then——”

“That will do,” Godmother interrupted. “The reign of George the Second brings us to the London we’re going to see to-day, _partly_, but not _altogether_ by magic. Some of it at least we can see in the course of a walk or drive, for it still exists. Now we’ll have the car and go as usual to London Bridge for a general view of the city that has risen up since the Fire and has been growing bigger and bigger for two hundred and fifty years.”

Half an hour later they were passing the Monument at the entrance to the Bridge, and this time Betty looked up at it with greater interest than ever.

“That marks the place where the Fire began,” she murmured. “How soon afterwards was it built, Godmother?”

“About eight years afterwards. Sir Christopher Wren designed it. He, as I hope you remember, was the great architect who practically rebuilt London. At least so far as great public buildings are concerned. We’ll get out now, and walk to the middle of the bridge.”

“The last time I saw it ‘magically’ the funny pretty houses on it were burning!” Betty said. “I do wish this was the very same bridge,” she added with a sigh.

“Well, at least it’s almost, though not quite in the same _place_ as the one you stood on with Chaucer, and that’s something, isn’t it? But now look right and left, and remembering the London you saw burning, tell me what changes you notice in the _kind_ of buildings you see now. There’s the new St. Paul’s, for instance, and you remember the old one?”

“It’s quite a different sort of church now,” Betty said. “Old St. Paul’s had a spire and pointed roofs and arches instead of that big dome with the ball and cross on the top. All the churches now are different,” she went on, looking from one white steeple to another rising above the houses.

“Yes. You see, don’t you?—that the _architecture_ of London,—that is, the way a building is made—has changed completely. Before the Fire, the churches and most of the other important buildings, were in a style we call Gothic. They had pointed arches, like Westminster Abbey, and if you keep the appearance of the Abbey in mind, you will have a good idea of what Gothic architecture means. See how very different is this new St. Paul’s! It has a dome. In front of it runs a line of pillars supporting a sort of stone triangle. Look at the gallery of columns upon which the dome rests. It is all as different as it can be, from the architecture of the Abbey. Now for the sort of architecture of which the new St. Paul’s is an example, the architects took the ancient Greek temples for their models. Nearly all the architects who lived later than Elizabeth’s time, built in this way, and Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones (who designed the Whitehall Banqueting House, you remember) were two of the men of the seventeenth century who planned their buildings on Grecian models. Now as Wren designed most of the important buildings, we may expect to find London architecture after the Fire, for the most part in this new style. It is called the _classical_ style, and the new St. Paul’s is a good example of it.”

“But all the crowded houses and quays and bridges that we see now weren’t here till much later even, than George the Second’s time, were they?”

“Indeed no, though of course London had grown bigger in the eighteenth century than it was even after the time of the Fire. When we make use of the ‘magic’ presently we’ll just take a glimpse of the City from London Bridge in the eighteenth century. I’ve only brought you here now to get a general view of the new sort of churches.”

“Where are we going now?” Betty asked as they re-entered the car.

“I’m going to take you to see one at least of the four Inns of Court.”

“Inns of Court? What are they?”

“Well, they were founded to be colleges for the study of law, and lawyers still live in them and dine in their halls, and law students have to pass examinations set by the men who govern the Inns. They are all rather close together, round about Fleet Street, which as you know is a continuation of the Strand.”

“This is Fleet Street, isn’t it?” Betty said. “Yes! There’s the monument with the Griffin on it in the middle of the road, outside the Law Courts.”

“And here is the entrance to the Middle Temple, quite close to that monument,” Godmother replied, stopping the car. “The Middle Temple is the name of one of the Inns. The others are the Inner Temple, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn. They are all interesting and beautiful, but we shall only have time to look at the two ‘Temples’—Middle and Inner—which are side by side.”

“Oh! what a nice entrance!” Betty said as they passed under an old brick gate and house.

“Yes. That was designed by Christopher Wren just after the Fire.”

“Why is this place called the Temple?” Betty asked, and almost in the same breath, “Oh, Godmother, how pretty it is! Isn’t it wonderful to turn out of the noisy street into this quiet place?”

“That’s one of the surprises of London town,” Godmother said. “It’s full of charming leafy places like this—if you know where to look for them.”

Betty was gazing at the straight-fronted houses enclosing numberless quiet courts,—houses whose bricks were now dark red with age, and from them she looked past a row of big, beautiful trees to where green lawns sloped down to the Embankment with the shining river beyond. She saw that the courts and corridors and gardens, covered a great space between Fleet Street on one hand and the river on the other.

“Let us sit down here under the trees in King’s Bench Walk,” Godmother said, “and I’ll tell you a little about this place. You asked me just now why it was called the Temple. Did you notice the church we’ve just passed—a curious _round_-shaped church? Well, that was built more than seven hundred years ago, when Henry the Second was king, and knights from every civilized country were going to Palestine to fight in the Crusades. Some of these knights formed themselves into a society called the Templars, because they had sworn to defend the Temple of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. Well, when the English knights belonging to this great Society, or _Order_ as it was called, came home, they built that church and made it round in shape, in imitation of the Round Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Once upon a time these Knights Templars owned all this ground upon which the lawns and houses before us now stand.”

“But I thought you said this was a place for _lawyers_?” Betty began.

“So I did, and so it is now, and so it has been ever since the reign of Edward the Third. By that time, the Knights Templars were no longer the good sincere men who had formed the Society a hundred years or so before. They had become rich and proud and greedy of power, and the society was at last brought to an end. The property belonging to it went to the King, and in Edward the Third’s reign, was given to certain lawyers, and has ever since belonged to the profession of the law. But it keeps its old name of the Temple, and so recalls the time when it belonged to the great religious society of the Knights Templars.”

“But none of _their_ houses or buildings are left here now?” Betty said.

“Nothing except the round church which they built seven hundred years ago.”

“And even the houses here now, aren’t so old as the time when the Temple first came to the lawyers, are they? They are quite different from the houses of Dick Whittington’s time, or even Elizabeth’s reign, for instance.”

“Yes. That’s because all these _small_ houses were built after the Fire, which destroyed most of the Temple. Fortunately it didn’t burn the church (the oldest part of it all), nor Middle Temple Hall, which was built in Elizabeth’s reign. We’ll go and look at that Hall now, because besides being beautiful, it’s full of interesting memories.”

They crossed various quiet courtyards till they came in sight of a Hall built of dark red brick and surrounded by the delicate green of trees, with lawns stretching in front of it towards the river.

“That great room,” said Godmother, “has seen some wonderful sights, especially at Christmas time, when feasting and revelry went on within it. You remember the ‘masques’ of Queen Elizabeth’s day? Well, Middle Temple Hall was a favourite place for them, and the Queen herself sometimes came to see them there. You will understand in a moment what a splendid place it was for entertainments.”

And indeed when Betty stood under the oak rafters of the great room, with its stained-glass windows and its wide floor, she could imagine it filled with laughing, dancing people of Elizabethan days, or as it looked when on a platform at one end of it, decked with holly and garlands of ivy, the players acted a masque before the standing crowd that filled the rest of the hall.

“In this very place,” Godmother said, “_Twelfth Night_ was once acted, and it is thought that Shakespeare himself took part in the performance of his own play. I hope the people who dine in it now sometimes think of the folk who feasted and made merry here hundreds of years ago.”

“Is it still the dining-room for the law people, then?”

“Yes, the governors of the Inn, the benchers as they are called, and the students dine here, and by an old custom no student can become a barrister unless he or she has dined a certain fixed number of times in this Hall.”

“_She?_” echoed Betty.

“Yes, don’t you know that women have lately been allowed to study for the law?” Godmother laughed. “If any of all the famous lawyers now dead, could come back to this place, perhaps of all the changes the one that might most astonish them would be to find girls and women dining—‘keeping commons’ as it is called—in this Hall which for hundreds and hundreds of years has been sacred to men alone.”

“_Shakespeare_ wouldn’t be so very surprised, perhaps?” suggested Betty. “He wasn’t a lawyer, of course. But he would remember writing about Portia.”

Godmother laughed again. “Quite right, Betty. I’m sure he would. And now that you mention Shakespeare, do you remember anything about the Temple in his plays?”

Betty shook her head.

“These are the gardens of Middle Temple,” said Godmother, pointing to the lawns in front of the Hall (on one of which some young men were playing tennis). “It was the same garden that Shakespeare, who knew it well, chose for a famous scene in his play of _Henry the Sixth_ when the party of Lancaster chose the red rose and the party of York the white one for a badge.”

“And then the Wars of the Roses began!” said Betty. “What does Shakespeare say about it?”

“The scene goes like this. The gentlemen who take different sides in the quarrel between the House of York and Lancaster are just coming out of that very building,” Godmother began, pointing to the Hall, “and one of them says:

‘Within the Temple Hall we were too loud:
The garden here is more convenient.’”

“This _very_ garden,” interrupted Betty. “Only I expect it was wilder and had lots of flowers in it then?”

“Evidently there were many rose bushes, for one noble, who is on the side of the Yorkists, says:

‘Let him that is a true born gentleman
And stands upon the honour of his birth
If he suppose that I have pleaded truth
From off this briar pluck a white rose with me.’

Then Somerset, on the side of the Lancastrians, takes up the challenge:

‘Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer
But dare maintain the party of the truth
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.’

So the white and red roses are picked and stuck into the doublets as the sides are taken, and another noble, wise enough to see into the future, says that this quarrel in the Temple Gardens ‘_shall send between the red rose and the white, A thousand souls to death and deadly night_.’ And so it did, in the dreadful long War of the Roses, as you remember.”

“But, Godmother,” began Betty after a moment, “I thought we were going to be in the eighteenth century to-day, and so far we’ve been talking about much earlier times!”

“So we have! And that’s the worst, or best, of London. When a place like this Temple, is very old, the history of a great many ‘times’ belongs to it. But you’re quite right to remind me that I brought you here because, except for the church, and the Hall, and one or two other buildings, the _look_ of the place as it is now, is much more seventeenth and eighteenth century than anything else, and is ‘mixed up’ as you so often say, with the lives of many interesting eighteenth-century writers, who lived in one or other of the houses enclosing these charming courts. You’ll know, or you _ought_ to know, two of them, if I mention their names. Dr. Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith.”

“I’ve read _The Vicar of Wakefield_ that Goldsmith wrote,” said Betty, “and I’ve heard of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary—but I don’t know much about him.”

“Yet he’s the man who will help us with our magic journey presently,” Godmother returned. “For the time you may remember that Oliver Goldsmith was one of his friends.”

“Why, there’s his name!” Betty exclaimed as she caught sight of a medallion on the wall of a house in an enclosure called Brick Court.

“That’s where he lived and died, and the tablet is there to commemorate him. He was buried in the churchyard of the Temple Church. Come! I will show you his tombstone. You will, I expect, read Goldsmith’s life when you are older, and find out what a lovable man he was, in spite of many tiresome ways,” she went on as they stood looking down at his grave.

“Perhaps we shall see him when the magic begins?” Betty suggested. “I should love to see him. The Sixth Form acted a scene out of _She Stoops to Conquer_ last term. That’s one of his plays, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and a very charming one. No doubt, as you say, we shall actually see him later on, but we can look at a very amusing picture of him even before the magic begins, in a house I’m going to take you to visit now at once.”

“What house? Who lives there?” asked Betty, turning to take a last glance at the quiet dignified old houses of the Temple before they left it for the noise and bustle of Fleet Street.

“No one now. But a hundred and seventy years ago Dr. Johnson lived there with his wife. It isn’t far from here, so we’ll walk.”

By this time they were standing under the archway at which they had entered the Temple.

“That’s the Law Courts, isn’t it?” Betty asked, pointing to a pile of buildings opposite. “But _they’re_ not old, are they?”

“No. They were built about forty years ago. But near them, are the two other beautiful old Inns I mentioned, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn, both of which you must see some day. This part of London is full of buildings connected with the law.

“Now let us walk a little way up Fleet Street, and as we go, notice what a number of narrow alleys or passages there are on the left. All of them are interesting, but we shall only have time for the special one we are going to see.”

“Crane Court, Bolt Court, Johnson’s Court—we’re getting near him, aren’t we?” Betty said as she read the names aloud.

“Fleet Street is full of memories of Dr. Johnson. He had many dwelling places, but however often he moved, he never went far from Fleet Street.”

Godmother now led the way up a narrow alley called Bolt Court, and in a moment they came to a little enclosure in which one or two of the houses were of the kind Betty had seen in the Temple, old, square, and built of dark red bricks, while others were quite modern business places.

“This is _Gough Square_, and here is Dr. Johnson’s house,” Godmother said, stopping opposite one of the old houses with the tiniest little garden in front of it. “For years it was used as an office for printers, and it would have been pulled down by now if a gentleman called Mr. Cecil Harmsworth had not bought it and given it to the nation to be kept for ever in memory of Dr. Johnson. Now we’ll ring the bell and go in, and you shall see what the inside of an eighteenth-century house was like. For this one has been arranged as nearly as possible as it was in Dr. Johnson’s time.”

Betty was delighted with the panelled rooms, with the quaint deep cupboards in the walls, one of which, as the interesting housekeeper who showed the place told her, was a powder closet, where the gentlemen’s wigs and the ladies’ hair were powdered before they went to parties or “routs,” and “assemblies,” as in eighteenth-century days, parties were called. Upstairs there was a big attic stretching the length of the house, and here it was that Dr. Johnson worked at his great and famous Dictionary. But every room was full of memories of him in the shape of letters or books arranged in glass cases, or in pictures on the walls.

“Here is the picture I told you about, showing Dr. Johnson and his friend Goldsmith together,” said Godmother, pointing to one of them. “It’s very interesting because the scene it represents, took place over there in Wine Office Court,”—she pointed out of the window to an opposite street,—“where at one time Goldsmith lived.”

“What are they doing?” asked Betty, looking at the painting. “That’s Goldsmith in the funny night-cap, I suppose?”

The caretaker, who seemed to know everything that was to be known about the house and its belongings, began to tell her the following story of the picture.

“Though he was the kindest-hearted man in the world, Oliver Goldsmith was so careless and happy-go-lucky that he was always in debt, and one morning before he was dressed, he sent over a messenger to this house in which you are standing, to borrow a guinea from his neighbour, Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson crossed this little Square which you see from the window, and went to his friend’s lodgings opposite, to find out what was the matter. The picture shows you why Goldsmith wanted the money. There is his angry landlady waiting to be paid, and there is Goldsmith in his night-cap and dressing-gown with Dr. Johnson sitting opposite to him, looking over some sheets of writing.”

“Why is he doing that?” Betty asked.

“Well, he knows that his friend is penniless, and even though he now has the money to pay his landlady, he must have some more to go on with. So he has asked him if he has written anything that might possibly be sold. Goldsmith, you see, has been rummaging in that box into which he has thrown stories he has written from time to time, and the manuscript he has just handed to Dr. Johnson is no other than _The Vicar of Wakefield_!

“That’s the story so far as the picture tells it. But we know what happens next. Dr. Johnson puts the manuscript into one of those big pockets of his, goes out, and in a short time returns with sixty pounds—the price he has received for the book by which Oliver Goldsmith is best known—the famous _Vicar of Wakefield_.”

“And perhaps if Dr. Johnson hadn’t taken it, it would never have been published at all?” Betty suggested.

“Very likely,” agreed Godmother. “Well, now that you’ve seen Dr. Johnson’s house, we’ll go and look at the inn in which he and Goldsmith often sat.”

They crossed the little Square, and found themselves almost at once in Wine Office Court.

“Unluckily Goldsmith’s house has gone, but here is the _Cheshire Cheese_, one of the oldest inns in London, for it was old, when Johnson and Goldsmith used to come here.”

They stepped then into the quaintest of taverns! It was dark, with low ceilings and sanded floors, and when they had looked at everything and seen the chair pointed out as Dr. Johnson’s, Betty could scarcely believe they were in modern London.

“I understand now why we don’t need ‘the magic’ to see a good deal of London as it was in the eighteenth century!” she remarked. “There’s quite a lot of it left.”

“Much more than most people know about, because only a few take the trouble to discover it hidden away behind modern buildings,” Godmother returned.

“Is there any other place left in Fleet Street that Johnson used to go to?” Betty asked. “You said he was always walking about here.”

“I’m afraid most of the other houses with memories of him have been pulled down, but before we leave Fleet Street let us go into the church where Sunday after Sunday he worshipped. You know St. Clement Danes? Here it is, standing in the middle of the road near to the Temple—one of the seventeenth-century churches built after the Fire.”

They entered, and Betty followed her Godmother up into the gallery where a tablet on a certain pew near the pulpit, marked Dr. Johnson’s seat.

“It’s interesting to know just where he sat,” Betty said, as they left the church. “Is the next place we’re going to, hidden away like Gough Square, Godmother?”

“Far from it. I’m going to take you now to the Adelphi, to which business people who have offices there, go every day.”

“The Adelphi? That’s a turning out of the Strand, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Have you ever asked what the name means?”

Betty shook her head.

“Does it sound to you like an English name?”

“_Adelphi_,” Betty repeated. “No, it doesn’t. What language is it?”

“Greek. It’s the Greek word for _brothers_.”

By this time the car had turned up a street near Charing Cross Station, and was moving slowly past lines of houses which Betty recognized as belonging to the eighteenth century.

“Look at the name of that street,” said Godmother, pointing to it.

“Durham House Street,” Betty read.

“Well now, remember the Strand as we saw it by magic about the time of Elizabeth, when stately houses surrounded by gardens, stood facing the river. Just here, where we are driving through these streets of eighteenth-century houses, stood Durham House, where Lady Jane Grey was born. We saw it, if you remember, when we were in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. That accounts for the name _Durham House Street_ which you’ve just seen. But it doesn’t account for names like Adam Street, and James Street, does it?” As she spoke, Godmother was pointing to them as they appeared written up on the walls of corner houses. “I’ll explain about that in a minute, when you’ve looked at this beautiful place we’re coming to, called Adelphi Terrace.”

They had turned into a broad road, open on one side to the river, and lined on the other side by a row of stately houses with delicately ornamented flat pillars, against the walls.

“The _Adelphi_, as you see,” she went on, “is really a whole district laid out in streets of eighteenth-century houses, built over the ground where Durham House once stood. About a hundred and fifty years ago, when Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith were living, there was a Scotch family of four brothers in London. Their names were John, James, Robert and William Adam. They were all architects, and also designers of a beautiful kind of furniture which has ever since been called _Adam_ furniture, and is now very valuable. These brothers built this little part of London which was not only called the Adelphi—that is ‘the Brothers’—in honour of them, but each brother gave his Christian name to a street, while yet another street bears the surname of the family. So we have Adam, James, John and Robert Streets. There used to be a William’s Street, but that has been changed to Durham House Street within the last few years.”

“Poor William!” said Betty. “He’s gone out of the family! Still, the new name _does_ remind us of Durham House and Lady Jane Grey, doesn’t it? Oh! _two_ of the brothers, Robert and James, lived here, Godmother!” she went on, pointing to a tablet on one of the houses in the terrace. “And here’s another tablet next door. It says that David Garrick lived in this house. Who was David Garrick?”

“A famous actor of the eighteenth century and one of Dr. Johnson’s friends. He acted at Drury Lane Theatre where, eighty years or so before his time, Pepys, you remember, used to go to see the pretty actress, Nell Gwynne. But you will read about these eighteenth-century people when you are older, and perhaps feel as I do, that you know them all very well. Take a last look at this Adelphi, because it’s a good example of the sort of architecture that belongs to the time of George the Second and Third. There are many other eighteenth-century streets and nooks and corners scattered about London among the forest of new buildings that has sprung up since the reign of George the Second. But I shall leave you to find them for yourself. It will make a nice occupation for you when you go for a walk! Now we must rush home if we want any lunch to-day.”

“But you won’t forget the ‘magic,’ will you?” urged Betty anxiously.

* * * * *

In the white parlour, an hour or two later, she sat full of expectation, watching Godmother as she took a volume from the enchanted cabinet.

“Here is the book that will take us back to-day,” she said. “It’s called _Boswell’s Life of Johnson_, and it’s almost as good for news of the eighteenth century, as _Pepys’ Diary_ is, for news of the seventeenth. Shut your eyes, hold the book in the magic way, and say, as Johnson used to say to his friend Boswell, ‘_Sir, let us walk down Fleet Street._’”

* * * * *

In a flash they were there, and at first sight Betty could scarcely believe it was the same Fleet Street she had left only a few hours previously. In a minute or two, however, she recognized it, in spite of the changes, for she stood close to the entrance to the Temple, and not far from it rose the church of St. Clement Danes. But the great pile of the new Law Courts had vanished, and so had the monument with the Griffin upon it in the middle of the road. Where that had stood an hour or two previously there stretched a fine stone gateway, and a line of little shops took the place of the Law Courts.

“That’s Temple Bar,” said Godmother, pointing to the gate. “If you had lived forty years ago, you would have seen it without the help of magic, for it had not then been pulled down.”

“What are those long spikes for on the top?” asked Betty, gazing up at the gate.

“For a horrible purpose. On them were fixed the heads of men who had been executed as traitors. Johnson and Goldsmith saw the heads of certain rebels on those spikes, only a hundred and seventy years ago.”

“I’m glad they’re not there now,” said Betty, shuddering. “Does Temple Bar belong to the time before the Fire?”