Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science | Page 2

out; so that at other times a long street full of
ships in the middle and houses on both sides looks like a dream." ...
"The city of Bristol is very unpleasant, and no civilized company in it;
only, the collector of the customs would have brought me acquainted
with merchants of whom I hear no great character. The streets are as
crowded as London, but the best image I can give you of it is, 'tis as if
Wapping and Southwark were ten times as big, or all their people ran
into London. Nothing is fine in it but the square, which is larger than
Grosvenor Square, and well builded, with a very fine brass statue in the
middle of King William on horseback; and the key, which is full of
ships, and goes round half the square. The College Green is pretty and
(like the square) set with trees. There is a cathedral, very neat, and
nineteen parish churches."
[Illustration: STEEP STREET, NOW PULLED DOWN.]
It is quite as curious to note what Pope omits as what he mentions. He
is much taken with a commonplace square, and with the mingling of
ships and houses (which is truly effective), but the modern traveller
would find the chief beauty of the city in its Gothic architecture, to
which Pope gives one line--"a cathedral, very neat, and nineteen parish
churches." Let the visitor ascend any one of the hills which overhang
Bristol, and a beautiful scene at once bursts upon his view: this is due
to the pre-eminent beauty of the church-towers, the great stone lilies of
the fifteenth century soaring above the dingy town; each,
For holy service built, with high disdain Surveys this lower stage of
earthly gain;
and a hard struggle they have to hold their own against the menacing
chimney-stacks of manufacturing England. All the poetry and
aspiration of the past seems contending, shoulder to shoulder, in thick
air with the material interests of the present.
Strolling about through the grimy streets, one's eye is caught by the
sign "Quakers' Friars," and following up the narrow court to seek the

meaning of this odd combination of opposing ideas, one comes to the
Friends' school, occupying the remnant of a former priory of Black
Friars. It is a spot intimately associated with recollections of the early
Friends. In 1690 the father of Judge Logan of Pennsylvania was master
of this school. Adjoining the school is the Friends' meeting-house, built
in 1669 on what was then an open space near the priory, where George
Fox often preached; and within the walls of the meeting-house this
Quaker father took upon himself the state of matrimony. A local bard is
inspired to sing:
Many years ago, six hundred or so, The Dominican monks had a
praying and eating house Just on the spot where a little square dot On
the Bristol map marks the old Quakers' meeting-house.
A different scene it was once, I ween: No monk is now heard his
prayers repeating; And the singers and chaunters and black gallivanters
Had never a thought of "a silent meeting."
[Illustration: "TIMES AND MIRROR" PRINTING-OFFICE, NOW
PULLED DOWN.]
The streets near by, called Callowhill, Philadelphia and Penn streets,
recall the residence here of William Penn in 1697, after his marriage
with Hannah, daughter of Thomas Callowhill and granddaughter of
Dennis Hollister, prominent merchants of Bristol. These streets are
believed to have been laid out and named by Penn on land belonging to
Hollister. Another Friend was Richard Champion, the inventor of
Bristol china and the friend of Burke. Champion's manufactory was not
commercially a success, but his ware is now highly prized, and some
few remaining pieces of a tea-service, presented by Mr. and Mrs.
Champion to Mrs. Burke at the time the latter's husband was returned
member for Bristol, have brought thrice their weight in gold.
In Castle street, not far from Quakers' Friars, stands a profusely
ornamented mansion, now St. Peter's Hospital. The eastern portion is of
considerable antiquity: the western was rebuilt in 1608. In the fifteenth
century the older portion was the residence of Thomas Norton, a
famous alchemist, who, according to Fuller, "undid himself and all his

friends who trusted him with money, living and dying very poor about
the year 1477."[2] Norton's ill-success was, however, in his own belief,
the success of others. He declared that a merchant's wife of Bristol had
stolen from him the elixir of life. "Some suspect her" (says Fuller) "to
have been the wife of William Cannings, contemporary with Norton,
who started up to so great and sudden wealth--the clearest evidence of
their conjecture." The person here intended is no other than the great
Bristol merchant William Canynge the younger, who was five times
mayor and one of the rebuilders of Redcliff