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                        Idle Hours in a Library




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                 ┌───────────────────────────────────┐
                 │                                   │
                 │        By the same Author         │
                 │                                   │
                 │  _The Church and the Stage_       │
                 │                                   │
                 │  _Introduction to the Philosophy  │
                 │    of Herbert Spencer_            │
                 │                                   │
                 │  _Studies in Interpretation_      │
                 │                                   │
                 └───────────────────────────────────┘




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                        Idle Hours in a Library

                                   By

                          William Henry Hudson

          Professor of English Literature, Stanford University

                             [Illustration]

                             William Doxey

                        At the Sign of the Lark

                             San Francisco




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                            COPYRIGHT, 1897

                             WILLIAM DOXEY


                            THE DOXEY PRESS




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                                   TO

                                F. E. H.

                         IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE
                             DEAR OLD DAYS




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                                Preface


The title of this little volume was chosen because it seems to indicate
a characteristic possessed in common by the otherwise unrelated essays
here brought together. They may all be described in a general way as
holiday tasks—the results of many hours of quiet but rather aimless
browsing among books, and not of special investigations, undertaken with
a view to definite scholastic ends. They are, moreover, as will readily
be seen, completely unacademic in style and intention. Three of the
papers were originally put into shape as popular lectures. The remaining
one—that on the Restoration novelists—was written for a magazine which
appeals not to a special body of students, but to the more general
reading public. The title, hit upon after some little searching, will, I
believe, therefore be accepted as fairly descriptive, and will not, I
hope, be condemned as overfanciful.

A word or two of more detailed explanation may, perhaps, be permitted.
Of the essays on Pepys’s Diary and the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” I
would simply say that they may be taken to testify to the unfailing
sources of unalloyed enjoyment I have found in these delightful books;
and I should be pleased to think that, while they may renew for some
readers the charm of old associations, they may perhaps send others here
and there for the first time to the works themselves—in which case I
shall be sure of the gratitude of some at least of those into whose
hands this little volume may chance to fall. I can scarcely say as much
as this for the study of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley—for most readers will
be quite as well off if they leave the lucubrations of these two ladies
alone. But in these days we all read novels; and it has seemed to me,
therefore, that my brief account of some of the early experiments in
English fiction may not be altogether lacking in interest and
suggestiveness. Thus, after some hesitation, I decided to find a place
for the authors of “Oroonoko” and “The New Atalantis” in these pages. So
far as the chapter on Shakspere’s London is concerned, it is needless to
do more than indicate the way in which it came to be written. A number
of years ago, while engaged for other purposes in the study of
Elizabethan popular literature, and more especially of the drama of the
period, I began, for my own satisfaction, to jot down, as I lighted upon
them, the more striking references and allusions to manners, customs,
and the social life of the time. I presently found that I had thus
gathered a good deal of miscellaneous material; and it then occurred to
me that, properly organized, my memoranda might be made into an
interesting popular lecture. The lecture was presently prepared, and was
frequently delivered, both in England and in this country. Naturally
enough, the paper can lay no claim to exhaustiveness; it is scrappy,
formless, and sometimes superficial. But the reader of Shakspere may
find it of some value, so far as it goes.

The essay on the Restoration novel is reproduced, greatly changed and
somewhat amplified, from the English magazine, “Time.” The remainder of
the volume has not before been in print.

In such a book as this, it would be pedantic to make a display of
authorities and references, though I hope that any direct indebtedness
has always been duly recorded in the proper place. But I must do myself
the pleasure of adding, that here, as elsewhere in my work, I have
gained more than I can say from the help and encouragement of my wife.

                                                   WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON.

    _Stanford University, California, 1897_




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                                Contents


                                                      Page
             London Life in Shakspere’s Time             1

             Pepys and His Diary                        65

             Two Novelists of the English Restoration  125

             A Glimpse of Bohemia                      181




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                    London Life in Shakspere’s Time




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                    London Life in Shakspere’s Time


It is the purpose of the present paper to give some glimpses of
every-day life in the English metropolis in the latter part of the
sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth centuries. Our subject
will take us from the main highways of history into by-paths illuminated
by the popular literature of the time. It is not the grave historian,
the statesman, or the philosopher, but rather the common playwright, the
ballad-monger, the pamphleteer, whom we must take here as our guides.
Yet ere we intrust ourselves to their care it will not be amiss if, with
the view of making the clearer what we shall presently have to say, we
pause for a moment at the outset to consider some of the more general
aspects of the period with which we are to deal.

Looking, then, first of all, at the political conditions of the time, we
may describe the history of the reign of Elizabeth as the history of
consolidation rather than of superficial change. What strikes us most is
not the addition of fresh culture-elements, but the reorganization and
expansion of elements already existing. The forces of evolution had
turned inward, acting more upon the internal structure than upon the
external forms of society. The Wars of the Roses were now things of
recollection only, the fierce contentions which the struggle between
York and Lancaster had produced having subsided with most of the bitter
feelings engendered by them. Save for the collision with Spain, which
ended in the defeat of the great Armada, England enjoyed a singular
immunity from complications with foreign powers; and an opportunity,
freely made use of, was thus offered for the development of foreign
trade. The growth of a strong commercial sentiment, consequent on this,
acted as a powerful solvent in the dissolution of feudal ideas and the
disintegration of feudal forms of life. The conflict was now mainly
between opinions—between rival forces of an intellectual and moral
character. The power of the upper classes—the representatives of the
ancient _régime_ of chivalry—was on the wane; the power of the middle
classes—the representatives of the modern _régime_ of commerce—showed
corresponding growth. The voice of the people, through their delegates
in Parliament, began to be acknowledged by the caution exhibited on
sundry critical occasions by the crown; the country at large was growing
richer and stronger; the sense of English unity was intensified by the
very dangers which menaced the national life; and as men came more and
more to recognize their individualities, they demanded greater freedom
of thought and speech. “England, alone of European nations,” as Mr.
Symonds pointed out, “received the influences of both Renaissance and
Reformation simultaneously.” The mighty forces generated by these two
movements in combination—one emancipating the reason, the other the
conscience, from the trammels of the Middle Ages—told in countless ways
upon the masses of society. But with all this,—partly, indeed, in
consequence of all this,—there was a deep-seated restlessness at the
very springs of life. The contests of opposing parties were carried on
with a fierceness and acerbity of which we know little in these more
moderate days; the minds of men were set at variance and thrown into
confusion by a thousand distracting issues; and, unrealized as yet in
all their significance and power, those Titanic religious and political
agencies were beginning to take shape which were by and by to rend
English society to its very core.

When we turn from the political character of the age to the moral
character of the people, we find it difficult to avoid having recourse
to a series of antitheses, after the familiar manner of Macaulay, so
violent and surprising are the contrasts, so diverse the component
qualities which analysis everywhere brings to light. The age was virile
in its power, its restlessness, its amazing energy and fertility; it was
virile, too, in its unrestraint, its fierceness, its licentiousness and
brutality. Men gloried in their newly conquered freedom, and in that
wider knowledge of the world which had been opened up to them by the
study of the past, by the scientific researches of Copernicus, Kepler,
and Galileo, by the discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci, Columbus,
Jenkinson, Willoughby, Drake. National feeling was strong; the national
pulse beat high. Yet, in spite of Protestantism and an open Bible, it
was essentially a pagan age; in spite of its Platonism and Euphuism, a
coarse and sensual one. You had only to scratch the superficial polish
to find the old savagery beneath. Your smiling and graceful courtier
would discourse of Seneca and Aristotle, but he would relish the
obscenest jest and act his part in the grossest intrigue. Your young
gallant would turn an Italian sonnet, or “tune the music of an ever vain
tongue,” but within an hour he might have been found in all the blood
and filth and turmoil of the cockpit or the bear-ring. The unseemliest
freedom prevailed throughout society—amidst the noble ladies in
immediate attendance upon the queen, and thence all down the social
scale. Laws were horribly brutal, habits revoltingly rude. All the
powerful instincts of a fresh, buoyant, self-reliant, ambitious, robust,
sensuous manhood had burst loose, finding expression now in wild
extravagance, indulgence, animalism, now in great effort on distant
seas, now in the mighty utterances of the drama; for these things were
but different facets of the same national character. Still, with all its
gigantic prodigality of energy, with all its untempered misuse of genius
and power, the English Renaissance kept itself free from many of the
worst features of the Spanish and Italian revivals. It was all very well
for Benvenuto Cellini to call the English “wild beasts.” Deep down
beneath the casuistry and Euphuism, beneath the artificiality and the
glittering veneer, beneath the coarseness and the brutalism, there was
ever to be found that which was lacking in the Southern character—a
stern, hardy, tough-fibred moral sense, which in that critical period of
disquietude and upheaval formed indeed the very sheet-anchor of the
nation’s hopes. It must never be forgotten that it was this age of
new-found freedom, and of that license which went with it like its
shadow, that produced such types of magnificent manhood as Raleigh,
strong “the fierce extremes of good and ill to brook”; as Spenser,
sweetest and purest of poets and of men; as Sidney, whom that same
Spenser might well describe as “the most noble and virtuous gentleman,
most worthy of all titles, both of learning and chivalry”; as Shakspere,
whom, all slanders notwithstanding, we, like his own close friends,
still think and speak of as our “Gentle Will.”

Such, so far as we are able to sum them up in a few brief sentences,
were some of the salient characteristics of the great age of the Virgin
Queen—an age, as Dean Church has said, “of vast ambitious adventure,
which went to sea, little knowing whither it went, and ill-provided with
knowledge or instrument”; but an age of magnificent enterprise and
achievement, none the less. And now it is for us to follow down into
some of the details of their private, every-day existence the men and
women who, to use a suggestive phrase of Goethe’s, were the citizens of
this period, and whose little lives shared, no matter in how small and
obscure a way, in the movements and destinies of the large world into
which they were born.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Just a quarter of a century before Queen Elizabeth’s death, a
proclamation was issued, reciting that her Majesty foresaw that “great
and manifold inconveniences and mischiefs” were likely to arise “from
the access and confluence of the people” to the metropolis, and making
certain stringent provisions with a view to keeping down the population
of the city. This enactment is useful as showing us that even at that
early date,—as later on, in the time of Smollett,—the enormous growth of
London was held to be matter for alarm. London was indeed increasing
rapidly in extent, population, wealth, and power; and Lyly was hardly
guilty of extravagance when, in his “Euphues,” he wrote of it as a place
that “both for the beauty of building, infinite riches, variety of all
things,” “excelleth all the cities of the world; insomuch that it may be
called the storehouse or mart of all Europe.” Yet we are most of us
probably unable without much effort to realize how different was the
English metropolis of Elizabeth’s time from the metropolis of the
present day.

We have to remember, in the first place, that the London with which we
are now concerned was a walled city, and that the territory which lay
within the walls,—that is, the metropolis proper,—represented but a very
small portion of what is now included within the civic area. Newgate,
Ludgate, Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, and Aldersgate, still mark
out and perpetuate by their names the narrow lines of those protecting
walls which held snug and secure the mere handful of folk of which
London was then composed. At nine o’clock in the evening, when Bow-bell
rang, and the voices of the other city churches took up the
curfew-strain, the gates were shut for the night, and the citizens
retired to their dwellings under the protection of armed watchmen who
guarded their slumbers along the walls. Westward from Fleet Street and
Holborn, beyond which so much of modern London lies, the city had not
then penetrated.

Within and about the walls there were many “fair churches for divine
service,” with old St. Paul’s in their midst—the Gothic St. Paul’s of
the days before the great fire; and many prisons to help the churches in
their philanthropic work. Open spaces were very numerous; trees were
everywhere to be seen; fields invaded the most sacred strongholds of
commercial activity; conduits and brooks (whereof Lamb’s Conduit Street
to-day carries a nominal reminiscence) flowed through every part of the
town. The narrow, straggling streets ran hither and thither with no very
marked definity of aim; for county councils had not as yet come into
existence, and metropolitan improvements were still hidden in the womb
of time; and so unsanitary were the general conditions that they were
seldom free from epidemic disease. Cheap, with its old cross just
opposite the entrance to Wood Street, was a famous spot for trading of
all kinds; but there were other localities which had their specialized
activities. St. Paul’s, for instance, was the acknowledged quarter for
booksellers, as indeed it has continued to be down to the present time.
Houndsditch, like the Houndsditch of to-day, and Long Lane in
Smithfield, abounded in shops for second-hand clothing—_fripperies_, as
they were called. “He shows like a walking frippery,” says one of the
characters in “The City Madam”; while it was in the latter place that
Mistress Birdlime in “Westward Ho” speaks of “hiring three liveries.” In
St. Martin’s-le-Grand clustered the foreign handicraftsmen of doubtful
character, who manufactured copper lace and imitation jewellery; and
Watling Street and Birchin Lane were the haunts of the tailors. Then,
again, it was in Bucklersbury that the grocers and druggists most did
congregate. “Go to Bucklersbury and fetch me two ounces of preserved
melons,” says Mistress Tenterhook in “Westward Ho.” Fleet Lane and Pie
Corner were so famous for their cook-shops that Anne in “The City Madam”
might well exclaim, when the porters enter with their baskets of
provisions, that they smell unmistakably of these localities; while to
Panyer Alley repaired all true lovers of tripe. Even religious opinions
had their special homes. Bloomsbury and Drury Lane, for example, were
favorite haunts of Catholics; and the Puritans were particularly strong
in Blackfriars. This explains the words put by Webster into the mouth of
one of his characters: “We are as pure about the heart as if we dwelt
amongst ’em in Blackfriars,” and Doll Common’s description of Face, in
“The Alchemist,” as—

            “A rascal, upstart, apocryphal captain,
             Whom not a Puritan in Blackfriars will trust.”

And through all this jumble of wealth and dirt, away past the suburbs
and into the open country beyond, ran “the famous River Thames”—the
“great silent highway,” as it has been called,—fed by the Fleet and
other forgotten and now hidden streams, and bearing upon its majestic
current its hundreds of watermen, its boats, its barges, and its swans.
It was spanned by a single bridge, of which Lyly speaks enthusiastically
in his “Euphues,” and which is described by the German traveller, Paul
Hentzner, as “a bridge of stone, eight hundred feet in length, of
wonderful work. It is supported,” this writer continues, “upon twenty
piers of square stone, sixty feet high and thirty broad, joined by
arches of about twenty feet diameter.” And he adds, touching in a brief
sentence upon a characteristic of its structure which must seem
particularly curious to modern readers: “The whole is covered on each
side with houses, so disposed as to have the appearance of a continued
street, not at all of a bridge.”

But if the difference between to-day and three centuries ago is striking
enough within the city walls, still more striking does it become as we
pass beyond the gates. Fleet Street, where Dr. Johnson was presently to
enjoy watching the ceaseless ebb and flow of the great tide of human
life, was still suburban; Chancery Lane, with its wide gardens on the
eastern side and Lincoln’s Inn enclosure on the western, possessed only
a few scattered houses at either end. The Strand—

                   “That goodly thoroughfare between
                           The court and city,”

as a Puritan poet called it—was a long country road flanked with
noblemen’s houses (“a continual row of palaces, belonging to the chief
nobility,” Hentzner says), the gardens of which on the one side ran down
to the river, and on the other backed upon the fine open space of
pasture-land called Covent (that is, Convent) Garden. At Charing there
was an ancient cross, and beyond, wide fields known as the Haymarket,
the quiet stretches of St. James’s Park, and the wide country road
called Piccadilly, the regular highway to Reading and the west. St.
Martin’s Lane ran up between hedgerows and meadows to Tottenham, or
Totten Court. In the other direction, towards Westminster, there was the
Court, with its Tiltyard, standing where the Horseguards now stand, and
beyond this the city of Westminster, with its abbey and great hall,
lying in the quiet fields. Just opposite, on the other bank, in an
unbroken expanse of country, stood Lambeth Palace, whence a long, lonely
road led eastward, through Lambeth Marsh, to the city purlieus on the
Surrey side