"Ravished in spirit I come, nay more I fly To thee, blessed place of my nativity!... O place! O people! manners framed to please All nations, customs, kindreds, languages! I am a free-born Roman; suffer then That I amongst you live a citizen. London my home is, though by hard fate sent Into a long and irksome banishment; Yet since called back, henceforward let me be, O native country! repossessed by thee; For rather than I'll to the West return, I'll beg of thee first here to have mine urn."
There speaks the true Cockney; he would sooner be dead in London than alive in the West of England. Even Lamb's love of London was scarcely greater than that.
[Illustration: THE GATEWAY. MIDDLE TEMPLE.]
It was fitting that Pope, essentially a town poet, should be born in Lombard Street. In the next thoroughfare, Cornhill, Gray was born; and, son of a butcher, Defoe began life in the parish of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. Shakespeare was an alien, but Bacon was born at York House, in the Strand; which, to my thinking, is the strongest argument in favour of the theory that he wrote the plays. Churchill was born at Vine Street, Westminster; Keats in Moorfields; and, staunchest and one of the most incorrigible Londoners of them all, Charles Lamb in Crown Office Row, Temple. He refers, in one of his essays, to Hare Court, in the Temple, and says: "It was a gloomy, churchyard-like court, with three trees and a pump in it. I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old." The pump is no longer there, only one half of Hare Court remains as it was in Lamb's day, and Crown Office Row has been rebuilt. His homes in Mitre Court Buildings and Inner Temple Lane have vanished also; but the Temple is still rich in reminiscences of him. Paper Buildings, King's Bench Walk, Harcourt Buildings, the fountain near Garden Court, the old Elizabethan Hall, in which tradition says Shakespeare read one of his plays to Queen Elizabeth--these and the church, the gardens, the winding lanes and quaint byways of the Temple, made up, as he said, his earliest recollections. "I repeat to this day," he writes, "no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot--