Literary shrines of London [Footnote:  From “Shakespeare’s England.”  By arrangement with the publishers, Moffat, Yard & Co.  Copyright by William Winter, 1878-1910.]

BY WILLIAM WINTER

The mind that can reverence historic associations needs no explanation of the charm that such associations possess.  There are streets and houses in London which, for pilgrims of this class, are haunted with memories and hallowed with an imperishable light that not even the dreary commonness of everyday life can quench or dim.  Almost every great author in English literature has here left some personal trace, some relic that brings you at once into his living presence.  In the time of Shakespeare,—­of whom it should be noted that, wherever found, he is found in elegant neighborhoods,—­Aldersgate was a secluded, peaceful quarter of the town, and there the poet had his residence, convenient to the theater in Blackfriars, in which he owned a share.  It is said that he dwelt at No. 134 Aldersgate Street (the house was long ago demolished), and in that region, amid all the din of traffic and all the discordant adjuncts of a new age, those who love him are in his company.  Milton was born in a court adjacent to Bread Street, Cheapside, and the explorer comes upon him as a resident in St. Bride’s churchyard,—­where the poet Lovelace was buried,—­and at No. 19 York Street, Westminster, in later times occupied by Jeremy Bentham and by William Hazlitt.  When secretary to Cromwell he lived in Scotland Yard, now the headquarters of the London police.  His last home was in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, but the visitor to that spot finds it covered by the Artillery barracks.  Walking through King Street, Westminster, you will not forget the great poet Edmund Spenser, who, a victim to barbarity, died there, in destitution and grief.  Ben Jonson’s terse record of that calamity says:  “The Irish having robbed Spenser’s goods and burnt his house and a little child new-born, he and his wife escaped, and after he died, for lack of bread, in King Street.”  Ben Jonson is closely associated with places that can still be seen.  He passed his boyhood near Charing Cross—­having been born in Hartshorn Lane, now Northumberland Street; he attended the parish school of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields; and persons who roam about Lincoln’s Inn will call to mind that he helped to build it—­a trowel in one hand and a volume of Horace in the other.  His residence, in his day of fame, was outside the Temple Bar, but all that neighborhood is new.

The Mermaid,—­which Jonson frequented, in companionship with Shakespeare, Fletcher, Herrick, Chapman, and Donne,—­was in Bread Street, but no trace of it remains, and a banking house stands now on the site of the old Devil Tavern, in Fleet Street, a room in which, called “The Apollo,” was the trysting place of the club of which he was the founder.  The famous inscription, “O,