to Sir George Carew that he would disguise himself, and get into a pair of oars to ease his mind with but a sight of the queen.' In the time of Elizabeth and the First James, and onward to very recent days, the North bank of the Thames was studded with the palaces of the nobles; and each palace had its landing-place, and its private retinue of barges and wherries; and many a freight of the brave and beautiful has been borne, amidst song and merriment, from house to house, to join the masque and the dance; and many a wily statesman, muffled in his cloak, has glided along unseen in his boat to some dark conference with his ambitious neighbour. Nothing could then have been more picturesque than the Strand, with its broad gardens, and lofty trees, and embattled turrets and pinnacles. Upon the river itself, busy as it was, fleets of swans were ever sailing; and they ventured unmolested into that channel which is now narrowed by vessels from every region. Paulus Jovius, who died in 1552, describing the Thames, says, "This river abounds in swans, swimming in flocks; the sight of whom, and their noise, are vastly agreeable to the fleets that meet them in their course." Shakspere must have seen this sight, when he made York compare the struggle of his followers at the battle of Wakefield to a swan encountering a tidal stream:

"As I have seen a swan,

With bootless labour swim against the tide,

And spend her strength with over-matching waves.'

But there were those, during three centuries, to whom the beauties of the silent highway could have offered no pleasure. The Thames was the road by which the victim of despotism came from the Tower to Westminster Hall, in most cases to return to his barge with the edge of the axe towards his face. One example is enough to suggest many painful recollections. When the Duke of Buckingham was conducted from his trial to the barge, "Sir Thomas Lovel desired him to sit on the cushions and carpet ordained for him. He said, 'Nay; for when I went to Westminster I was Duke of Buckingham; now I am but Edward Bohun, the most caitiff of the world." "+ But these exhibitions, frequent as they were, occupied little of the thoughts of those who were moving upon the Thames, in hundreds of boats, intent upon business or amusement. In the beginning of the seventeenth century the river was at the height of its glory as the great thoroughfare of London. Howel maintains that the river of Thames hath not her fellow, "if regard be had to those forests of masts which are perpetually upon her; the variety of smaller wooden bottoms playing up and down; the stately palaces that are built upon both sides of her banks so thick; which made divers foreign ambassadors affirm that the most glorious sight in the world, take water and land together, was to come upon a high tide from Gravesend, and shoot the bridge to Westminster." Of the "smaller wooden bottoms," Stow computes that there were in his time as many as two thousand; and he makes the very extraordinary statement, that there were forty thousand watermen upon the rolls of the company, and that they could furnish twenty thousand men for the fleet. The private watermen of the court and of the nobility were doubtless included in this large number. It is evident, from the representations of a royal procession in the early times of James I., that, even on common occasions, the sovereign moved upon Londinopolis, p. 403.

* Henry VI., part III.

+ Hall.

the Thames with regal pomp, surrounded with many boats of guards and mu

The Inns of Court, too, filled as they were not only with the great practitioners of the law, but with thousands of wealthy students, gave ample employment to the watermen. Upon the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the Palatine, in 1613, the gentlemen of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn presented a sumptuous masque at court. "These maskers, with their whole train in all triumphant manner and good order, took barge at Winchester Stairs, about seven of the clock that night, and rowed to Whitehall against the tide the chief maskers went in the king's barge royally adorned, and plenteously furnished with a great number of great wax lights, that they alone made a glorious show: other gentlemen went in the prince's barge, and certain other went in other fair barges, and were led by two admirals: besides all these, they had four lusty warlike galleys to convoy and attend them; each barge and galley, being replenished with store of torchlights, made so rare and brave a show upon the water, as the like was never seen upon the Thames." When Charles was created Prince of Wales, in 1616, he came from Barn Elms to Whitehall in great aquatic state. In 1625, when Henrietta Maria arrived in London (June 16), "the king and queen in the royal barge, with many other barges of honour and thousands of boats, passed through London Bridge to Whitehall; infinite numbers, besides these, in wherries, standing in houses, ships, lighters, western barges, and on each side of the shore."t What a contrast does this splendour and rejoicing present to the scene which a few years disclosed!" The barge-windows," (says Mr. Mead, the writer of this letter,) "notwithstanding the vehement shower, were open: and all the people Ellis's Letters, vol. iii. p. 196.

*Howes' Continuation of Stow's Annals, p. 1007.

shouting amain. She put out her hand, and shaked it unto them." The Whitehall, to which the daughter of Henri Quatre was thus conveyed, had another tale to tell in some twenty-three years; and the long tragedy of the fated race of the Stuarts almost reaches its catastrophe, when, in a cold winter night of 1688, the wife of James II. takes a common boat at Whitehall to fly with her child to some place of safety; and when in a few weeks later the fated king steps into a barge, surrounded by Dutch guards, amidst the triumph of his enemies, and the pity even of those good men who blamed his obstinacy and rashness: "I saw him take barge," says Evelyn," a sad sight." But let us turn from political changes to those more enduring revolutions which changes of manners produce.

We have before us a goodly folio volume of some six or seven hundred pages, closely printed, and containing about seventy thousand lines, for the most part of heroic verse, entitled "All the Works of John Taylor, the Water-Poet, being sixty and three in number, collected into one volume by the Author."* John Taylor, who made this collection of his tracts in 1630, was literally a Thames waterman, working daily for his bread. He says,

I have a trade, much like an alchemist,
That oft-times by extraction, if I list,
With sweating labour at a wooden oar
I'll get the coin'd, refined, silver ore;

Which I count better than the sharping tricks
Of cozening tradesmen, or rich politicks,

Or any proud fool, ne'er so proud or wise,

That does my needful honest trade despise." +

The waterman's verses are not so ambitious as those of the Venetian gondolier, Antonio Bianchi, who wrote an epic poem in twelve cantos; but they possess a great deal of rough vigour, and altogether open to us very curious views of London manners in the early part of the seventeenth century. Taylor is never ashamed of his trade; and he cannot endure it to be supposed that his waterman's vocation is incompatible with the sturdiest assertion of his rights to the poetical dignity :

:

In one of his controversies-for he generally had some stiff quarrel on hand with witlings who looked down upon him-he says, addressing William Fennor, "the king's rhyming poet,"

"Thou say st that Poetry descended is

From Poverty: thou tak'st thy mark amiss.

In spite of weal or woe, or want of pelf,

It is a kingdom of content itself."

Such a spirit would go far to make a writer whose works would be worth looking

* Taylor, after the publication of this volume, printed about fifty more tracts, in prose and verse.

.

at two centuries after the praise or abuse of his contemporaries was forgotten; and so homely John Taylor, amongst the race of satirists and manner-painters, is not to be despised. "The gentleman-like sculler at the Hope on the Bankside" (as he makes Fennor call him) lived in a poetical atmosphere. He probably had the good fortune to ferry Shakspere from Whitehall to Paris Garden; he boasts of his acquaintance with Ben Jonson; and the cause of his great quarrel with Fennor is thus set forth: "Be it known unto all men, that I, John Taylor, waterman, did agree with William Fennor (who arrogantly and falsely entitles himself the King's Majesty's Rhyming Poet) to answer me at a trial of wit, on the 7th of October last, 1614, at the Hope Stage on the Bank-side; . . and when the day came that the play should have been performed, the house being filled with a great audience who had all spent their money extraordinarily, then this companion for an ass ran away and left me for a fool, amongst thousands of critical censurers." Taylor had taken his waterman's position in a spot where there was a thriving trade. The Bankside was the landing-place to which the inhabitants of Westminster, and of the Strand, and of London west of Paul's, would daily throng in the days of the Drama's glory; when the Globe could boast of the highest of the land amongst its visitors; when Essex and Southampton, out of favour at court, repaired thither to listen, unsatiated, to the lessons of the great master of philosophy; when crowds of earnest people, not intent only upon amusement, went there to study their country's history, or learn the "humanities" in a school where the poet could dare to proclaim universal truths in an age of individual dissimulation; and when even the idle profligate might for a moment forget his habits of self-indulgence, and be roused into sympathy with his fellows, by the art which then triumphed, and still triumphs, over all competition. Other places of amusement were on the Bankside-the Paris

Garden, the Rose, and the Hope playhouses; and in earlier times, and even when the drama had reached its highest point of popular attraction, on the same spot were the "Bear-houses"-places of resort not only for the rude multitude, but to which Elizabeth carried the French ambassador to exhibit the courage of English bull-dogs. Imagine Southwark, the peculiar ground of summer theatres and circi, with no bridge but that of London, and we may easily understand that John Taylor sang the praises of the river with his whole heart :

"But noble Thames, whilst I can hold a pen,

I will divulge thy glory unto men:

Thou in the morning, when my coin is scant,
Before the evening doth supply my want."*

:

But the empire of the watermen was destined to be invaded; and its enemies approached to its conquest, after the Tartarian fashion, with mighty chariots crowded with multitudes. Taylor was not slow to complain of this change. In his Thief,' published in 1622, he tells us that,

"When Queen Elizabeth came to the crown,
A coach in England then was scarcely known;"

and he adds, "'tis not fit" that

"Fulsome madams, and new scurvy squires,
Should jolt the streets at pomp, at their desires,
Like great triumphant Tamburlaines, each day,
Drawn with the pamper'd jades of Belgia,
That almost all the streets are chok'd outright,
Where men can hardly pass, from morn till night,
Whilst watermen want work."

In a prose tract, published in the following year, Taylor goes forth to the attack upon "coaches" with great vehemence, but with a conviction that his warfare will not be successful: "I do not inveigh against any coaches that belong to persons of worth or quality, but only against the caterpillar swarm of hirelings. They have undone my poor trade, whereof I am a member; and though I look for no reformation, yet I expect the benefit of an old proverb, Give the losers leave to speak.'" He maintains that "this infernal swarm of trade-spillers (coaches) have so overrun the land that we can get no living upon the water; for I dare truly affirm that every day in any term, especially if the court be at Whitehall, they do rob us of our livings, and carry five hundred sixty fares daily from us." This is a very exact computation, formed perhaps upon personal enumeration of the number of hired coaches passing to Westminster. He naturally enough contrasts the quiet of his own highway with the turmoil of the landthoroughfare: "I pray you look into the streets, and the chambers or lodgings in Fleet Street or the Strand, how they are pestered with them (coaches), especially after a mask or a play at the court, where even the very earth quakes and trembles, the casements shatter, tatter, and clatter, and such a confused noise is made, so that a man can neither sleep, speak, hear, write, or eat his dinner or supper quiet for them." The history of this innovation we shall have to recount in a future paper. The irruption of coaches must have been as fearful a calamity to John Taylor and his fraternity in those days, as the establishment of railroads has been to postmasters and postboys in our own. These transitions diminish