Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/207

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hedges, and spitting over polished andirons, and gorging himself with raw turnips sliced in brandy)—worthy, sententious Evelyn shall see these things no more. Nay, nor that "glorious gallery," quoted from his description innumerable times, where was the dissolute king "sitting toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine, &c.; a French boy singing love-songs, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and others were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2,000l. in gold before them. Six days after, all was in the dust." And worse.

Little boy Hogarth, you shall often pass by the banqueting-house—ay, and admire Hans Holbein's wondrous gate of red brick, tesselated in quaint and beauteous design; of which the fragments, when the gate was pulled down in 1760, were begged by William, Duke of Cumberland, and the pieces numbered, with the project of having them transferred to Windsor park and there re-erected as a royal ducal lodge. But the project was never carried out, and the duke probably forgot all about it, or found something more worth begging for than a lot of old building materials. So exit Whitehall palace: buttery, bakehouse, wood and coal yards, spicery, charcoal-house, king's privy cellar, council chamber, hearth-money office, and other fripperies in stone. It must have been a grand place, even as the heterogeneous pile that existed in William Dutchman's time; but if James or Charles had possessed the funds to rebuild it according to Inigo Jones's magnificent plan, of which the banqueting-house is but an instalment, the palace of Whitehall would have put to the blush the Baths of Diocletian, the golden house of Nero—yea, and the temple which Erostratus burnt, to prove that all things were vanity, even to incendiarism.

Will it please you to walk into the city, now that we have done with Westminster, any day in these three years of the moribund seventeenth century. London is busy enough, noisy enough, dirty enough; but not so smoky. There is little or no foot pavement; but there are plenty of posts and plenty of kennels—three hundred and eleven, I think, between Newgate and Charing Cross. When the humorous operation, resorted to with ugly frequency about this time, of whipping a man at the cart's tail, takes place, the hangman gives the poor wretch a lash at every kennel the near wheel of the cart grates against. Newgate to Ludgate, Charing Cross to the "Cockpit" at Westminster, are considered the mildest pilgrimages to be undergone by these poor flagellated knaves; but Charing to Newgate is the real via dolorosa of stripes. That pilgrimage was reserved for the great objects of political hatred and vengeance in James II.'s reign—for Titus Oates and Thomas Dangerfield. The former abominable liar and perjurer, stripped of his ambrosial periwig and rustling silk canonicals, turned out of his lodgings in Whitehall, and reduced to the very last of the last, is tried and sentenced, and is very nearly scourged to death. He is to pay an enormous fine besides, and is to lie in Newgate for the remainder of his life. I wonder that like "flagrant Tutchin," when shuddering under a sentence almost as frightful, he did not petition to be hanged: yet