Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 6.djvu/330

 272 NOTES AND QUERIES. p* s. VL OCT. a, HUM. or "on the gates of your wards," and the story becomes just barely plausible, but down to 1684 for a portion of the human body, and 1696 for a head—the first head—there is, as I have said, no instance of any such post- humous exposure on Temple Bar,* or any of the minor openings into the great city which were, and are, colloquially termed its bars. But while it may be demonstrated, as I submit that I have succeeded in doing, that Henry VIII. could never have asso- ciated Temple Bar, as he know it, with any notion of penal posthumous exposure, Dr. Johnson would quite naturally—involun- tarily—adopt the idea. He had never seen severed heads surmounting any city gatesj whereas from his twenty-ninth to his sixty- third year, from his first acquaintance with Temple Bar to within seven years of the time at which he is reported as retailing the anecdote, he had never beheld this imposing arch, giving western entrance to the great city s liberties, otherwise than so encumbered, and thus we may fairly concede that he spoke casually and thoughtlessly under the impression that the arch — then only a hundred and seven years old—and its humble predecessors had been so adorned (?) from time immemorial, as many people apparently believe even at the present day. The second head spiked on Temple Bar, which, as I have said, was a considerable time after Defoe stood in the pillory there—a head thus impaled not under the Stuart, but in the second year of the Hanoverian, dynasty—was that of Joseph Sullivan, executed at Tyburn on the date I have mentioned in the early part of this paper for recruiting in London and its vicinity in the interest of the Jacobite rebels organizing the outbreak of 1715. I daresay the following summary of fieads (I italicize, for I disregard " quarters") ex- posed from time to time on Temple Bar has already appeared in your columns, but this which may, indeed, have been said for ages to have groaned under the rotting skulls with which Temple Bar," where the bar demolished in 1879 is represented crowned with the conventional " block ornaments" of heads and quarters, but I have elsewhere in these columns (ml> lit. ' Artists' Mis- takes,' 9th S. v. 317) exposed the anachronism of depicting the arch erected in 1072 (Temple Bar as the artist saw it) as forming the background to a scene enacted in 1660. t I italicize. I repeat that Temple Bar, ancient or modern, was never one of the City gates strictly speaking. seems to present an opportune occasion for thus reproducing it, prefacing that all the "heads" so enumerated have been displayed from the crowning leads of the arch tnat spanned Fleet Street from 1672 to 1879 : Sir William Parkyns, 1696; Joseph Sullivan, 1715; Col. Henry Oxburgh, 1716; Christopher Layer, 1723 : Col. Francis Townley, 1746; George Fletcher, 1746. The head of the fourth victim in the above list remained exposed until 1754 or 1755 ; it was the longest occupant of the grim eleva- tion. The heads of the fifth and sixth weathered the air until 1772, when in the same year—a month or two intervening— they were successively blown down by high winds. Boswell has not recorded—probably the Doctor never informed him—the date when the well-known conversation on the capping of quotations on the subject of the monuments in Westminster Abbey and the "heads on Temple Bar" was exchanged between John- son and Goldsmith ('Life'chap. xxi.). The Doctor related this episode of good-natured raillery on Friday. 30 ApriL 1773, but does not say when it took place or now long before. He only uses the words, " When we got to Temple Bar, he [Goldsmith] stopped me, pointed to the heads upon it, and slily whispered," &c. We are not informed whether two or three heads then disfigured the arch. If the colloquy occurred before 1754 or 1755, there would have been three such "block orna- ments," viz., those of Christopher Layer, Col. Townley, and George Fletcher. If the episode be assigned to a date between 1755 ana 1772. only two heads, those of Townley ana Fletcher, would have crowned the—in that sense—evil eminence. GNOMON. Temple. P.S.—Since the above was written ME. HOPE'S communication has appeared. I am grateful for it, as, I submit, it affords material support to my speculations in the second and third paragraphs of this paper. Dr. John- son's anachronism, paragraphs 7 et seq., has been noted by Dr. G. Birkpeck Hill in his edition of the 'Life'; see his note to p. 408, vol. iii. As this was not the edition from which I quoted, the fact of this recognition of error had escaped me. THE GRAVE OF GEORGE HERIOT (9th S. vi. 170).—The burial-ground which was acquired in 1866, referred to as above, was enclosed by the workhouse of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and was exclusively, or very nearly so, ap-