The Evening Telegraph

OLD ST. PAUL'S.

The London Athenæum, in a review of "the Annals of St. Paul's Cathedral," gives the following interesting sketch of the site, and the buildings which preceded the present one:—

Dean Milman ignores London before the Roman period; but he admits that the hill on which the Cathedral stands must have been of importance in every period. The theory that a "temple to Diana" was erected there is strengthened by the discovery, in 1830, when excavations for the foundation of Goldsmiths' Hall were being made, of a stone altar bearing the image of the goddess.

The Dean adds, in reference to the story of a temple to Apollo having preceded the Abbey at Westminster, "My dear friend, the Dean of Westminster must produce an image of Apollo, as like that of the Belvedere as this to the Diana of the Louvre, before he can fairly compete with us for the antiquity of heathen worship."

A Roman camp, a Saxon temple, then an episcopal see fixed in London by Mellitus, the companion of St. Augustine; next a cathedral built by Ethelbert, King of Kent, with the sanction of Sæbert, King of the East Angles; a relapse to heathenism, and finally the restoration of St. Paul's by the famous St. Erkenwald, early in the seventh century, and often to by Swein by fire, brief incidents of the early history of the great London hill and its summit. Among gifts made to the church, that by Ethelbert to the estate of Tillingham, Essex, "even now contributes largely to the maintenance of the fabric."

Among the bishops of the Norman period perhaps the most remarkable was Gilbert, the great philosopher, who loved money as much as philosophy. After his death, his boots, full of gold and silver, were carried to the Exchequer, and the people held that the most consummate of philosophers might be the greatest of fools. The king who seized the cash thought otherwise. After a new cathedral church had been built, such a one as made the wielders of Wren's pickaxes blaspheme as they battered at the ruins left by the Great Fire, it became the scene of high events. The citizens had acquired such an opinion of their power that they believed they possessed, in fact, what was allowed them in theory, the right of naming their king when the throne was vacant. Few things more stirred the Londoners to wrath than to hear their king called, in papal decrees, the Pope's vassal. The presence of foreign prelates, lording it in the capital, stirred the pulses of those valiant citizens. The English clergy themselves bowed the head with shame at the subjection and slavery in which they were held by Italians, and many gave loud and indignant tongue to their feelings. Lay citizens and clergy alike beheld with aversion the gorgeous spectacle of a papal legate enthroned in St. Paul's, and placing himself above the sovereign by enacting laws and enforcing money tributes, and playing lord paramount over them.

The Londoners were men who would not endure oppression from the King himself; still less would they tolerate that "the King should be accounted a vassal" by the Pope. In no place did the national sentiment on this matter find more lusty expression than in and about St. Paul's. These Londoners loved not tyranny at any man's hands; and they resented ill words the same as ill deeds. When they cried, "Down with the Inns of Court!" because they hated the lawyers generally, and Archbishop Sudbury, the Chancellor, in particular, Sudbury was indiscreet enough to call the sufficiently irritated Londoners "a shoeless rabble!" It was an aspersion on their gentility. They, therefore, donned their best shoes, went about St. Paul's, took counsel together, grasped tight hold of their weapons, and murdered Sudbury outright. The pious but angry fellows made a distinction. They would not lay rude hand on the prelate, they only murdered the Chancellor.

From a very early period, however, the popular voice and the popular presence established themselves somewhat rudely in St. Paul's. In Edward the Third's time petty dealers exposed their wares for sale inside the church. The more sacred the day the more active was the market; and the fair in nave and aisles was most thronged while service or sermon was going on within hearing. With this there was worse sacrilege, such as Lambeth Marsh and Bethnal Green cannot now match on their worst Sundays. The summits of the pillars, their tracery work, and about the rich cornices were the coigns of vantage occupied by multitudes of birds, especially pigeons and jackdaws. It was the delight of the London lads of the day to carry their bows and arrows to the interior of the Cathedral and to amuse themselves in bringing down the birds, and with them, of course, some bit of sculptured ornament struck by their bolts. All sorts of noisy games were at the same time carried on both within and without the church, and many a beautiful and costly painted window was mutilated by these Londoners, who were, however, sufficiently pious to pause for a while when they were threatened with excommunication. When the voice of the threatener died out and left no echo, the apprentices and nice young gentlemen of those days were at their iniquitous fun again.

Meanwhile, every possible illustration of ecclesiastical grandeur was to be seen there too; royal funeral pomps, marriage solemnities, episcopal enthronations, solemn convocations, fierce and uncharitable debatings, and—most memorable—the proclamation of the first capital sentence under the writ for burning heretics, A. D. 1400. The proclamation could not deter free inquirers from reading the "Lanterne of Light," which was a good book that was a scandal to ultra Papists. These cried "fire and fagot!" but many a wise man in the devout congregation of St. Paul's agreed with their Bishop, Pecock, who averred that "the clergy will be condemned at the last day, if by free will they draw not men into consent of true faith otherwise than by fire and sword and fagot." On the other hand, there were men of authority in St. Paul's who would not take even a heretic's life but on warrant of Scripture. When a religious man desired to destroy a religious opponent who was skeptical and inquiring, it was hard if he could not find a text that should suit his purpose. A weak spirit or two once breathed a prayer for mercy towards the Lollards. "Mercy!" cried one who had that dangerous thing, a little learning,—"What does St. Paul say, 'Hæreticum hominem post unam et alteram corruptionem, devita!'—De vita!" he repeated with fiercer emphasis, as meaning not devita, "Avoid him," but "Out of life with him!" and heretics were destroyed through this interpretation of a clerical jester, who saw no joke in heresy.

In the most dangerous of these periods the cathedral itself hardly illustrated a serious religious sentiment. There were preachings, and at the famous Cross, but the temple was sort a trysting-point for people who met for various purposes, and an exchange for the transaction of affairs and collecting of news. The pillars and the walls of the nave were covered with advertisements, secular as well as clerical. There was a reading of these, and a discussing and a walking to and fro, and a chaffering and ruffling, with now and then a gallant or citizen or buxom wench who would compound for the profanation by turning aside for a minute or two to worship at mass or listen to a sermon when the latter was in English, ad populum. It is curious to observe how, while these things were tolerated, small observances were enforced. If an apprentice entered the church with his cap on, or a gallant kept covered, he was rudely brought to civility by the vergers. Beggars would totter in, out of the hot summer sun or the winter snow, and, weary, filthy, and sleepy, would lie down in the midst of clean worshippers. The vergers had to rouse these unwholesome visitants and bid them move on! The nave, too, was at one time the favorite walking place of all the frail and saucy beauty of the city. In very early times these damsels, when caught, and especially if they were dressed more demonstratively than the law allowed, were fiddled out of the city in mock procession, which only left the not deeply blushing offenders at the entrance to Cock Lane. The readers of "Ned Ward" will remember that, in more recent days, the public mad galleries at St. Luke's were to these persons what St. Paul's was before, and the Quadrant became in our own period. Dean Milman thinks that in the earlier times, the instructions for keeping objectionable personages out of the cathedral were seldom or never carried out with rigid severity.

As the period of the Reformation approached and was reached, it cannot be said that manners improved. Morals and customs hardly knew a change. The ruthless destruction of beautiful realities, as well as of things encouraging harmless sentiment, was a disgrace to all concerned. Dean Milman alludes to a curious and not creditable letter about a rich cross, adorned with jewels, secretly taken from the church by Smythe, a residentiary, and presented to Anne Boleyn, with the understanding that he would have her favor in certain transactions with the Dean and Chapter. The things done openly were even worse than this stealing and receiving. The old preaching could not have been in accordance with practice, or the people would have thought and spoken more becomingly of what the priests had described as the Real Presence, while they acted as if there was neither Presence nor Reality. Popular slang called the mystery of the Sacrament by the irreverent appellation of "Jack-in-the-box." Popular poets wrote coarse and vulgar ballads, which were answered from the other side in ballads equally coarse and vulgar, sung in support of religion and purity. "Ridley preached in vain. Sunday after Sunday the Cathedral was thronged, not with decent and respectable citizens, but with a noisy rabble, many of them boys, to hear unseemly language on that solemn rite, so sacred to all religious minds, so passionately adored by those of the old faith."

Yet all laws intended to preserve the Cathedral from public profanation seem to have been disregarded. The people appeared to consider it their own house and ground, at least when it was not used for some especially gorgeous Church or State ceremony. Under the Tudors the public had established a right of way. The thoroughfare was theirs as unquestioned as Cheapside. Brewers traversed it from north to south or south to north with their laden drays drawn by their clattering teams of heavy horses; bakers passed through with their loaves on their head, or drove through in their carts: mules, horses, dogs, all were employed, as well as men, in the porterage of every species, often of the heaviest wares; and the noisiest thoroughfare in London was this road through St. Paul's Cathedral. Every attempt to suppress the abuse, save the prohibition of passage for quadrupeds, seems to have failed. Fine and imprisonment were not sufficient to deter offenders. Elizabeth, however, took means to succeed better than her predecessors in restoring something like decorum and suppressing anything approaching to riot. She set up a pillory in the church-yard, close to the bishop's residence. The first man fixed in it was condemned for a fray in the church. "Fired" is the suitable term, seeing that he was nailed by the ears to the post, and he was unfixed simply by cutting his head away from them, when the unlucky fellow was sent earless home.

Elizabeth would have no more shooting, no more arrow-flying, no more drawing of daggers either within or near the Cathedral; no more dealing therein was to be allowed, no walking up and down, no bargaining, loitering, gossiping, no profanation of any sort, during divine service. At other hours of the day the open Cathedral nave was the show-ground of fashion—the asylum of those who shunned daylight. Paul's Walk had its modish hours and its modish ways, and gradually even Queen Bess' proclamation became but as idle thunder. Horses and mules did not recover their right or custom of entry, but every other nuisance did. The idle went there out of idleness: the hungry were there when other men were at the ordinaries; and the former were said to dine with Duke Humphrey, whom popular error transferred from his tomb in St. Alban's to one which was occupied by a Beauchamp in St. Paul's. In his lifetime the good Duke never let hungry guest depart with the appetite he brought with him, for he was the most hospitable of hosts, and he especially loved to have scholars at his table. With the idle and the hungry were plumed cavaliers, and thieves looking after their purses; painted women ogling fools, and ruffians watching the women. Merchants congregated on ground of their own; gulls read swindling advertisements, or yielded themselves to rascals who lived by them. Parasites walked by the side of haughty patrons, and flattered them loudly as they walked; others made savory jests, at which their patrons smiled with a scorn as if they were half indignant that they could be brought to smile at anything. There was not a more fashionable, and at the same time a more villainous locality. If it was a scandal to divines, it was also a study for dramatists. Comedy and Farce borrowed examples from it, and exaggerated nothing they had borrowed. The middle aisle of St. Paul's occupies the stage in the third act of Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humor. It is peopled by impudence, rascalry, and uncleanness. "Shift," the knave of the play, posts, without being observed, certain bills on the walls, and as Dean Milman remarks, "Precious bills they were to be read on the walls of a church!" But saith "Shift," "If I were to deny the manuscripts, I were worthy to be banished the middle aisle forever." The noise that prevailed there was compared by Bishop Earle to that of bees—"a strange hum mixed of walking, tongues, and feet," and, as he sharply notes, "were the steeple not sanctified, nothing liker Babel." It was the very statute fair of clerical hirelings themselves; "it is," says Earle, "the market of young lecturers whom you may cheapen here, at all rates and sizes." When reformation entirely changed this scene, this class of men still lingered about the place, like disengaged actors at a stage-door. In later years they were the "tattered cassocks" who paced the precincts, the "threepenny curates," who dozed in the boxes of the Chapter Coffee House, waiting to be hired. They were not exacting, as their designation implies. They were ready to read service or sermon for twopence and a cup of coffee. These men, too, have long since disappeared. Their immediate successors were the "Jobbing Parsons," prouder fellows, who would do another man's duty for a guinea, yet who were not so proud but they would perform it for half the money. In the present day clerical agencies furnish substitutes at reasonable prices, and some of these gentlemen are "originals" of the very rarest quality.

But to return for an instant to the period of Bishop Earle (ob. Bishop of Salisbury, 1665), it is to be observed that Paul's Walk then was what the Stock Exchange is now, in one respect. There were invented half the current jokes of the day: there were coined and stamped half the lies that bewildered simple, honest souls. Looking at the place in another of its phases, it was the "Finish," at which rakes, bloods, swash-bucklers, and all fast individuals by whatever other name designated, consummated the day's iniquity. After the play, after the tavern, after issuing from places of resort which the Bishop names without scruple, "men have still some oaths left to swear here." At this time, moreover, one circumstance in the fashion of the place is remarkable. The sisterhood was no more to be seen than the horses and mules. The visitants, says the Bishop, are all men without exception, but the principal inhabitants and possessors are stale knights and captains out of service: men of long rapiers and breeches, and so forth. The very senses are shocked by some of the details to be read about St. Paul's and the indecencies openly practised there. It was spared no profanation, in the worst of acts as well as the worst of words. Heathen temples had the homage of a cleaner respect from poor pagans. A couple of snakes painted crosswise on the exterior saved each temple from all offense: but at St. Paul's there was no respect for the sacred edifice, outside or inside.

After fire, neglect, violence, decay, and other causes had led to a condition which necessitated the works of reparation by Inigo Jones, in Charles the First's reign, one of the many means for providing the sums required to complete the work was the levying of heavy mulcts for moral delinquencies, and applying them for the completion of the Cathedral. The oftener men offended against morality the better for the funds of the Cathedral. Such offenders were fined heavily for their pleasantest sins, and we are told "the common saying spread abroad again that, in another sense, St. Paul's was restored out of the sins of the people." We may add that Inigo Jones, with all his genius, marred what he was set to make whole. His work was that of a ruthless restorer. He defaced what was left of the old Gothic beauty, and faced the west entrance with a Roman portico. It was like painting the portrait of a man in mixed costume belonging to ages wide apart.

The example, however, served bad purpose in the succeeding century. When the boy Louis the Fifteenth recovered from the attack supposed to be smallpox, the people of Metz manifested their gratitude to God by destroying the picturesque glory of their Cathedral. They added the portico, which still masks its beauty. The smallpox itself could not more effectually destroy the grace of feature and expression in man.

The details of the great fire, which destroyed this restored St. Paul's, are taken from Pepys, Evelyn, and Taswell. As a whole, the Cathedral dated from William the Conqueror, but it had undergone many a change between its creation and its fall. The Westminster Boys worked like men in doing their utmost to check the fire, and the honor is awarded them of having been most instrumental in saving St. Dunstan's-in-the-East. Burnet remarks that he never heard of any person being burnt or trodden to death at the fire.