Page:The Maclise Portrait-Gallery.djvu/137

 by his brother-in-law. The Stout Gentleman was written, too, at Birmingham. Many of his letters to Leslie are dated from that town, and headed "Edgbaston Castle," or "Van Tromp House"; and it was the magnificent mansion of the Holtes at Aston, now the property of the town, which served as an ideal model for his Bracebridge Hall. Some interesting reminiscences of Washington Irving in Birmingham were communicated to the Illustrated Midland News, of Sept. 25, 1869, by Elihu Burritt, the learned American blacksmith, who long held a Consular position in that town.

When in London, Irving took up his residence for a while in Canonbury House, Islington. To the literary pilgrim from the far West, this "land of the grey old past" is the Mecca and Medina of his youthful aspirations. "None but those who have experienced it," says Irving, in one of his own charming essays, "can form an idea of the delicious throng of sensations which rush into an American's bosom, when he first comes in sight of Europe. There is a volume of associations with the very name. It is the land of promise, teeming with everything of which his childhood has heard, or on which his studious years have pondered." We can thus understand the feelings with which the young American enthusiast of letters made choice, as abode, of the ancient red-brick tower of Canonbury. It derives its name from having been built upon the site of the country residence of the Prior of the Canons of St. Bartholomew, and was, according to tradition, a hunting seat of Queen Elizabeth, where she was wont to take the air when "Merry Islington" was a woodland solitude. The Tower was built by Sir John Spencer of Crosby Place, whose only daughter and heiress eloped hence, concealed in a baker's basket, to become the wife of William, second Lord Compton, created in 1618 Earl of Northampton, a lineal ancestor of the ninth Earl and first Marquis of Northampton, the present owner of Canonbury. Here subsequently lived Ephraim Chambers, whose Encyclopædia is the basis and parent of all subsequent Cyclopædias in the English and other European languages; and here, too, he died in 1740, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Here also Newbery, the children's bookseller, lodged; and in his rooms Goldsmith often hid from his creditors, and consecrated the spot to all time by writing there his Deserted Village, and the immortal Vicar of Wakefield. William Woodfall, too, the publisher of the letters of "Junius," once had lodgings in this historic tower. Here Irving installed himself; exploring the neighbourhood, and eating his solitary dinners at the "Black Bull," which, according to tradition, was a country seat of Sir Walter Raleigh. Here he sat and sipped his modest glass in a quaint old room, wherein imagination whispered many a council had been held. But all this soon came to an end. On the next Sunday the world and his wife came thronging to Canonbury Castle; the road was alive with the tread of feet and the clack of tongues; and the would-be hermit found that his retreat was a show-house, and the tower and its contents thrown open to cockney visitors at sixpence a head!

Maginn would fain have known if this genial writer was affiliated to the great smoke-guild, whose members are scattered all over the world,—in simple words, whether or not he was a smoker. "To judge," says he, "by his gentlemanly appearance he ought to be one. Smoking is, and always has been, a healthful and fashionable English custom; there were