Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science | Page 2

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 church. His ships, which crowded the quays of Bristol, were a more evident source of wealth than any cunningly devised elixir except in the eyes of a disappointed dreamer. The