ROSE STREET.
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We are giving here a picture of a London street, which is now rapidly vanishing before the advance of the spirit of clearance and ventilation; and if it should be actually gone before our readers can see these pages, some of them, doubtless, will call to mind that this was as nearly as possible the spectacle which presented itself at an opening looking into King Street, Covent Garden, at the end of the first week in the present October. The formal epitaph of this street now lies in the mason’s yard adjoining, in the form of a tablet detached from one of the houses, and which bears the superscription,—“This is Red Rose Street, 1623.”
Low gambling-houses, floors let out to numerous families, with fearful broods of children, sundry variations of the magisterial permission “to be drunk on the premises,” strange chaotic trades to which no one skilled contribution imparted a distinctive character; and, by way of a moral drawn from the far-off pure air of open fields and farm yards, a London dairy, professing to be constantly supplied with fresh butter, cream, and new milk from the country:—were some of the special features of the Rose Street of our time. If this were all, Rose Street might go down into dust without a word of epitaph. But there are circumstances connected with it which will render it immortal in our annals, when its very site shall have become a matter of doubt, hundreds of years hence.
It was here in this murky purlieu of Covent Garden, that Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras, died in 1680 of a complication of ailments and miseries, the most urgent of which was want.
Thyrsis has gained preferment for a song,
While Hudibras does starve among the throng.
While Hudibras does starve amongState Poems.
In the first blush of his fame, no man ever had a fairer prospect of achieving honour and independence; but the sequel shows, as his epitaph warns us,
How little faith is due to courts and kings.
The King used to go about with Hudibras in his pocket; he was eternally quoting it; he thought it the wittiest, the funniest, and the wisest book in the world. His Majesty even went so far as to send for Butler, that he might have the royal satisfaction of looking at him; “but,” says a contemporary, “Butler was starved at the very time the King had his book in his pocket.” Panegyrics descended upon him from the highest quarters in showers, containing, however, no golden drops; the Lord Chancellor hung up his portrait in his state dining-room, and Lord Dorset sought, through a friend, a private meeting with him over a. bottle in a tavern. Hudibras was in everybody’s hand. No book ever obtained so wide and immediate a reputation. Its most striking couplets acquired at once the weight and familiarity of proverbs. They furnished the staple of the town talk for months; and the wits of the day traded on their subtle and trenchant humours. The palace and the playhouse, the chocolate house and the taverns, rang with the echoes of his verse. Yet, says Oldham, who survived him only three years,
Of all his gains by verse he could not save
Enough to buy him flannel and a grave;
Reduced to want, he in due time fell sick,
Was fain to die, and be interr’d on tick.
