I have a garden of my own, But so with roses overgrown, And lilies, that you would it guess To be a little wilderness.
I cross the threshold of the adjoining house, and stand within the actual domicile of staid Andrew's improper neighbour, Mistress Nell Gwynne. It was from a window of this house she threatened to drop her baby, unless her Merry Monarch would there and then confer name and title on him; and thus came England into the honour and glory of a ducal race of St. Albans.
When Nell Gwynne looked up from that signally successful jest, she may have seen, across the street, the two houses wherein, a few years before, had dwelt the stern Protector of the Commonwealth and the husband of his daughter, Ireton. I wonder what she thought of old Noll!
The houses stand there yet, substantial, square, their red brick "mellowed but not impaired by time."
The "restored" Charles had had the corpses of over a hundred Puritans, including Admiral Blake's, and that of Cromwell's old mother, dug up from their graves and flung in a heap in St. Margaret's Churchyard; he had hung in chains on Tyburn gallows the disinterred clay of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw. I wonder he was not prompted to pull down these dwellings of his father's "murderers." He must have seen them often. Their windows overlooked the garden of his light-o'-love.
Did _she_ intercede to have them preserved? As I linger there, I like to think so.
Still within a half-mile circle of my home, on the same Highgate Hill whereon stand the houses of Nell Gwynne and Ireton, I can show my children the "werry, indentical" milestone from which--_ita legenda scripta_--Dick Whittington was recalled by the sound of Bow Bells.
At the top of Highgate Hill, and on the slope of another hill where a man (since dead in the workhouse) saved Queen Victoria's life, stands the house where Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived. Here, and, it is said, in a little inn near by, he entertained such company as Shelley, Keats, Byron, Leigh Hunt, and--surely not in the little inn?--Carlyle.
Coleridge lies buried in the churchyard hard by, and in Highgate Cemetery I find the graves of George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens' daughter Dora, Tom Sayers the prize-fighter, and Lillywhite the cricketer.