KING STREET, WESTMINSTER.

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dingy alleys, and, with one single exception, he found every street which he was in search of, bearing the same name by which it was distinguished two centuries ago. Milton, Spenser, Herrick, Ben Jonson, Davenant, Dorset, with how many of the greatest or the sweetest of our national poets are those streets associated! To the author, the most pleasing part of his labours, in composing the present work, has been to search out the haunts,and they generally comprise the calamities,-of departed genius,

Free from the crowd, each hallowed spot I roam,
Where genius found a death-bed or a home;
While memory lingers on each honoured name,
Through life despised, yet heirs to endless fame;
Children of fancy, famine, and despair,

Whose drink was tears, whose daily bread was care;
Ambition's playthings, o'er whose sacred dust.
Relenting Time has reared the tardy bust.
Here Dryden's genius soared its lofty flight,
There fancy blazed through Milton's darkened sight;
These walls still speak of Goldsmith's mournful tale;
Here Spenser starved; there Rushworth died in jail;
Here Otway's fate yon frowning Tower recalls;
Here Gay was nursed in Queensberry's ducal halls ;-
Those walls, where Prior was beloved of yore,
Received with rapture one true poet more.
Here, in this chamber, Congreve's hours were blest,
With blooming Wortley for his evening guest;
Here Oldfield's beaming eyes and quiet mirth
Threw love and laughter o'er the poet's hearth;
Here flashed his wit, and here the poet died,
Marlborough's young Duchess weeping by his side;
Reversed for him the bard's proverbial doom,

Through life beloved, and wept o'er in the tomb. J. H. J.

Previous to the building of the present Par

liament Street, late in the last century, King Street constituted the only thoroughfare between the cities of London and Westminster; and such was its miserable state, that, to a late period, on the days on which the sovereign opened or dissolved Parliament, faggots were thrown into the ruts to render the passage of the ponderous state-coach more easy. When we consider this circumstance, it is not a little curious, in glancing over the "New View of London," published in 1708, to find King Street dignified as "the most spacious street and principal for trade in Westminster, being between the gate at the south end of the Privy Garden and the Abbey Yard." It may be mentioned that the gate, here alluded to, was not the one designed by Holbein, which we shall describe in our notices of Whitehall, but a smaller one which spanned King Street, immediately to the north of where Downing Street now stands. The latter originally formed a part of the palace of Whitehall, and in the reign of Charles the First contained the apartments of the beautiful and intriguing Mary Countess of Buckingham, the mother of the great favourite, George Villiers Duke of Buckingham. She died in the "Gatehouse Whitehall," in 1632, and from hence her body was conveyed with great pomp to Westminster Abbey, where it lies beside the murdered remains of her ill-fated son.

King Street is replete with interesting associations. Either in this gloomy thoroughfare, or in the streets which diverge from it, have lived or

died many illustrious persons whose names are familiar to us in the literary or historical annals of our country; moreover, through this mean thoroughfare, the majority of our Kings, since the Conquest, have passed to their coronations at Westminster, and not a few of them subsequently to their tombs in the Abbey.

The first illustrious name with which King Street is associated, is that of Edmund Spenser. When Tyrone's rebellion burst forth in Ireland, in 1598, the political opinions of the great poet rendered him so obnoxious to the infuriated insurgents, that his only hope for safety was in an immediate flight. He had scarcely turned his back on his beloved home at Kilcolman, when the rebels took possession of it; his goods were carried off; the house was set on fire, and an infant child, whom he had been compelled to leave behind in the confusion of his flight, perished in the flames. Ruined and brokenhearted, the great poet flew to England, and, on his arrival in the vast metropolis, took up his abode in a small inn or lodging-house in King Street, Westminster. The circumstances of his end are too painful to reflect upon. Drummond of Hawthornden tells us in his "Conversations with Ben Jonson;"" Ben Jonson told me that Spenser's goods were robbed by the Irish in Tyrone's rebellion; his house and a little child of his burnt; and he and his wife merely escaped; that he afterwards died in King Street by absolute want of bread; and that he refused twenty pieces sent him by the Earl

of Essex, and gave this answer to the person who brought them, that he was sure he had no time to spend them."

Such was the end of that great poet, of whom Dryden said, "No man was ever born with a greater genius, or had more knowledge to support it;" whom Thomson, the author of the "Seasons," confessedly took as his model;-whom Joseph Warton ranked in erudition next to Milton;—whom Milton himself was not ashamed to confess as his original; of whom Cowley tells us that he was "made a poet" by reading Spenser ;-of whom Pope tells us that he read the "Fairy Queen" "with a vast deal of delight," when he was twelve years, and that he read it with no less pleasure after the lapse of nearly half a century; and, lastly, of whom Gibbon says (I quote from memory);-“The armorial shield of the Spensers may be emblazoned with the triumphs of a Marlborough, but I exhort them to look upon the Fairy Queen' as the proudest jewel in their coronet."

The poet, as we have seen, died in a miserable lodging-house of absolute want of bread; but, as is often the fate of genius, the breath had scarcely departed from his body, when the great, the titled, and the powerful, came forward to do honour to his memory, and to shower laurels on his grave. His remains were carried in state from King Street to Westminster: the expenses of his funeral were defrayed by the great favourite, the Earl of Essex. "His hearse," says Camden, "was attended by poets

and mournful elegies; and poems, with the pens that wrote them, were thrown into his tomb;" and, lastly, the celebrated Anne, Countess of Dorset, erected the monument over his grave.

Oh! it sickens the heart to see bosoms so hollow,
And spirits so mean in the great and high-born;
To think what a long line of titles may follow

The relics of him who died-friendless and lorn!

How proud they can press to the funeral array

Of one, whom they shunned in his sickness and sorrow: The bailiffs may seize his last blanket to-day,

Whose pall shall be held up by nobles to-morrow!*

One would like to be able to point out the house in King Street in which once resided the courtier and poet, Thomas Carew, the most graceful poet of the reign of Charles the First, and afterwards the faithful adherent of his unfortunate master. Here it was that Ben Jonson, Sir William Davenant, May, the translator of Lucan's "Pharsalia," and Sir John Suckling, were his frequent guests. His burial-place is unknown, and even the year of his death is a disputed point; but the beautiful song,He that loves a rosy cheek,

Or a coral lip admires, &c.

will continue to be read and appreciated as long as the English language shall remain in existence.

In King Street, too, lived the witty and accomplished Charles Lord Buckhurst, afterwards Earl of Dorset.

For pointed satire I would Buckhurst choose,
The best good man with the worst-natured muse.

This was a high compliment from Rochester to * Moore's Monody on the death of Sheridan.