A worthy woman--albeit garrulous--guides us over the old tower. After saying that “she knew Oliver’s life well,” she added, “Them poets seem to be always poor and in want.” It was astonishing to see the number and spaciousness of the chambers in the old place, and their picturesque rambling disposition. One was struck with admiration at the two spacious rooms on the second and third floors, finely proportioned and baronial, each adorned with ebony-toned oak panelling reaching to the ceiling, and each with an elaborately carved mantelpiece, such as would have rejoiced Charles Lamb at Blakesware. The delicacy and finish of the work cannot be surpassed. There are old solid doors, black as ink, hanging on hinges a yard long; fragments of old oak banisters; while in the upper stories windows with diamond panes are still seen. The stair mounts in an irregular way: off which are curious chambers and many odd “crannies.”
About 1766, the bookseller Newbery, as we learn from the pleasant account of him just published, contracted with a Mr. Fleming, the then tenant, to board and lodge the poet for £50 a year. According to this authority, Goldsmith’s room was that on the second floor, and here he is described as reading to one of the younger Newberys passages from his MS. George Daniel, the bibliophile, who made a pilgrimage to the tower--if he did not reside there--and gathered up the traditions, found that the first-floor room was believed to have been the Doctor’s, and “an old press bedstead in the corner” was shown in proof. Two families, the Tappses and the Evanses, had been in care of the place for over 140 years: and Mrs. Tapps used to retail many stories about the poet to her niece, who was in possession at the time of Mr. Daniel’s visit. Washington Irving was so much interested by the place that he took up his abode there for a time. Other tenants have been the eccentric Dr. Hill, of Garrick’s happy epigram--
For physic and farces His equal there scarce is: His farces are physic, His physic a farce is;
with Smart, the mad poet, who wrote an epic in Bedlam; Humphreys, another poet; “Junius” Woodfall; Chambers, who wrote an encyclopædia; and Speaker Onslow. A later resident was Seymour, the artist, associated with the earlier numbers of “Pickwick,” who shut himself up here with a fellow student to study “High Art,” a line he fortunately abandoned for what was his real gift. What rooms in London offer so curious a succession of tenants? Some time ago a “Young Men’s Association” fixed itself here, but the young men are fled, and once more “desolate is the dwelling of Morna.” The view from the platform on the roof was almost confounding: the vast champaign spreading away below to the wooded hills of Hampstead and Highgate; while the keen inspiriting air blew from these heights. It was a surprise even for a fair and _spirituelle_ antiquary of our acquaintance, who was tempted up to the dizzy elevation, and could scarcely credit that London offered such a spectacle. St. Paul’s seemed to lie at your feet.