The Pleasures of England | Page 9

the Thames-side, had been rightly understood and cultivated.
Many of my hearers can imagine far better than I, the look that London must have had in Alfred's and Canute's days.[3] I have not, indeed, the least idea myself what its buildings were like, but certainly the groups of its shipping must have been superb; small, but entirely seaworthy vessels, manned by the best seamen in the then world. Of course, now, at Chatham and Portsmouth we have our ironclads,--extremely beautiful and beautifully manageable things, no doubt--to set against this Saxon and Danish shipping; but the Saxon war-ships lay here at London shore--bright with banner and shield and dragon prow,--instead of these you may be happier, but are not handsomer, in having, now, the coal-barge, the penny steamer, and the wherry full of shop boys and girls. I dwell however for a moment only on the naval aspect of the tidal waters in the days of Alfred, because I can refer you for all detail on this part of our subject to the wonderful opening chapter of Dean Stanley's History of Westminster Abbey, where you will find the origin of the name of London given as "The City of Ships." He does not, however, tell you, that there were built, then and there, the biggest war-ships in the world. I have often said to friends who praised my own books that I would rather have written that chapter than any one of them; yet if I had been able to write the historical part of it, the conclusions drawn would have been extremely different. The Dean indeed describes with a poet's joy the River of wells, which rose from those "once consecrated springs which now lie choked in Holywell and Clerkenwell, and the rivulet of Ulebrig which crossed the Strand under the Ivy bridge"; but it is only in the spirit of a modern citizen of Belgravia that he exults in the fact that "the great arteries of our crowded streets, the vast sewers which cleanse our habitations, are fed by the life-blood of those old and living streams; that underneath our tread the Tyburn, and the Holborn, and the Fleet, and the Wall Brook, are still pursuing their ceaseless course, still ministering to the good of man, though in a far different fashion than when Druids drank of their sacred springs, and Saxons were baptized in their rushing waters, ages ago."
[Footnote 3: Here Alfred's Silver Penny was shown and commented on, thus:--Of what London was like in the days of faith, I can show you one piece of artistic evidence. It is Alfred's silver penny struck in London mint. The character of a coinage is quite conclusive evidence in national history, and there is no great empire in progress, but tells its story in beautiful coins. Here in Alfred's penny, a round coin with L.O.N.D.I.N.I.A. struck on it, you have just the same beauty of design, the same enigmatical arrangement of letters, as in the early inscription, which it is "the pride of my life" to have discovered at Venice. This inscription ("the first words that Venice ever speaks aloud") is, it will be remembered, on the Church of St. Giacomo di Rialto, and runs, being interpreted--"Around this temple, let the merchant's law be just, his weights true, and his covenants faithful."]
Whatever sympathy you may feel with these eloquent expressions of that entire complacency in the present, past, and future, which peculiarly animates Dean Stanley's writings, I must, in this case, pray you to observe that the transmutation of holy wells into sewers has, at least, destroyed the charm and utility of the Thames as a salmon stream, and I must ask you to read with attention the succeeding portions of the chapter which record the legends of the river fisheries in their relation to the first Abbey of Westminster; dedicated by its builders to St. Peter, not merely in his office of cornerstone of the Church, nor even figuratively as a fisher of men, but directly as a fisher of fish:--and which maintained themselves, you will see, in actual ceremony down to 1382, when a fisherman still annually took his place beside the Prior, after having brought in a salmon for St. Peter, which was carried in state down the middle of the refectory.
But as I refer to this page for the exact word, my eye is caught by one of the sentences of Londonian[4] thought which constantly pervert the well-meant books of pious England. "We see also," says the Dean, "the union of innocent fiction with worldly craft, which marks so many of the legends both of Pagan and Christian times." I might simply reply to this insinuation that times which have no legends differ from the legendary ones merely by uniting guilty, instead of innocent, fiction, with worldly