Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 9.djvu/65

 n s. ix. JAN. 17, i9i4.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

" amplified to four times " the original length of the essay. For much about the wanderings of Dickens in London see pp. 10 and 27.

The price of the book in yellow paper covers, bearing a portrait of Dickens, vt~as Is. I have seen it quoted in booksellers' cata- logues at 5s. and 7s. 6d.

ROBERT PIERPOINT.

[SlR. WlLLOUftHBY MAYCOCK, MR. JOHN T. PAGE,

and MR. T. W. TYRRELL also thanked for replies.]

0n

London in English Literature. By Percy H. Boynton. (Published in the United Kingdom by The Cambridge University Press, London, as Agents for the University of Chicago Press.) WE must confess to a great liking for this book which Mr. Boynton puts forth so modestly. He says at once : " It is not addressed primarily to scholars. It has been written for students and readers who enjoy literature the better as they more clearly understand the original setting. Nothing is included in the volume which cannot easily be traced by reference to standard works on London and obvious sources in literature." He then suggests that " perhaps some student will be beguiled to complete on an ample scale a book for which the present volume hardly more than suggests a working method." Despite our author's almost excessive inclination to depreciate the value of his work, it is evident that it has been pleasing to him, so that he seems to have forgotten the labour he has gone through in order to compress so much into three hundred and fifty pages, which include an excellent Index. Headers would require to wade through many volumes to obtain the information to be found here.

The arrangement of the sections is good. First we have Chaucer's London, " a full-fledged city with a long history behind it," to be followed by a description of London in the time of Shake- speare, showing the changes which had taken place during the two hundred years that had passed. London had considerably more than doubled in population, having risen from about 40,000 to 100,000. The old wall was still pre- served in its integrity, but a large amount of building had been done outside it. " The Thames in Shakespeare's day was a splendid stream, of which one can get a fair idea from the drawings of Visscher and Hollar. It was a subject on which Elizabeth loved to dwell, the fairness of the water, the abundance of the fish, and the beauty of the myriads of swans who floated upon it appealing to every eye."

The next section is devoted to Milton's London. As is well known, Milton lived in no fewer than eleven houses. On the occasion of the Great Plague Milton escaped by taking refuge at Chalfdnt St. Giles. During his stay there he com- pleted ' Paradise Lost,' and began ' Paradise Regained ' ; but London seemed to draw him, and he returned before the Fire. Yet he was spared immediate loss from this by the situation of his residence in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields.

Dryden's London brings us also to Evelyn and Pepys. The poet's chief residence, and the one to which his name is most closely attached, was in Gerrard Street, Soho. Dryden was one of its earliest inhabitants, living at No. 43 until his- death on the 1st of May, 1700. This historic house was for a time tenanted by Messrs. Kegan. Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co., who published an illustrated booklet, written by Mr. H. B. Wheatley, entitled ' Gerrard Street and its Neighbourhood.'

The Addison period shows that a literary- reading public was for the first time beginning to develope : " The ultimate result of this widen- ing attention to literature was to be an enor- mously important one, for in the course of a hundred years this public was to provide such a consistent market for decent literary effort that the old literary patron was to be quite super- seded."

Literary discussions led to the further in- crease of the number of coffee-houses. Among broadsides there appeared ' The Women's Petition against Coffee,' a protest asserting that " coffee- drinking encouraged idling and talkativeness, and led men to ' trifle away their time, scald their chops, and spend their money, all for a little base,, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking, nauseous puddle water.' "

After a talk about Johnson's London we come to Dickens's London and Victorian London, closing with the London of the present day, with " the dust of the centuries drifted round it> gradually raising the ground level so that the- records of the past are packed in layers beneath the pavements of to-day." It is " like an old parchment, which has been written on and erased, recovered with script and re-erased, until 1 what exists to-day shows beneath the latest superficial transcript microscopic traces of all the romantic stories written on it since the hour when it first lay immaculate beneath the pen of the medieval cleric."

At the end of each period Mr. Boynton gives a short bibliography of works dealing with it. In addition to these, there is an appendix of novels. The book is full of illustrations, including London Bridge (from Hollar's view, 1647), eight old gates sacrificed to make way for traffic, St. Paul's Cross in 1621, coffee-house interiors, Trafalgar- Square, and the old Houses of Parliament.

John Evelyn in Naples, 1645. Edited by H.

Maynard Smith. (Oxford, Blaokwell.) IT is with no slight pleasure that we commend this unpretentious, but delightful and scholarly booklet to the notice of intending visitors to Naples. It embodies well a happy idea. That part of Evelyn's 'Diary' which is concerned with Naples and its environs is set out in fifteen sections, each followed by its own group of careful and pithy notes. Many of these contain illustrative quotations from, and references to, the works of other English travellers of the seven- teenth and early eighteenth centuries, of thirteen of whom there is given, by way of introduction, a short account, which specifies also the edition of their several works here used by the editor. While these form perhaps the most characteristic,, they are by no means the only sources of informa- tion drawn upon, as the useful list of authorities at the end of the book itself sufficiently attests. Somewhat out-of-the-\vay facts of historical and