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CHAPTER X.

Poets of the Thames.-Burial Place of Henry the Sixth at Chertsey Abbey.-Retirement of Cowley.-A walk on Cooper's Hill.- Sir John Denham-Runnymead and Magna Charta Island.-London Stone.-Jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor upon the Thames.-The River Colne.Reminiscences of Milton.

HE close of our last ramble left us at Chertsey, our mind teeming with reminiscences of Cowley, of Denham, of Pope, of Gray, of Surrey, and of Shaks

peare, and of other poets, who have made the banks of the Thames from this place to Windsor, classic and holy ground; Chertsey, therefore, claims our first notice. It is a place of considerable antiquity. Its once famous Abbey for Benedictine monks, was founded so early as the year 666, and flourished till 1538, when it was dissolved by Henry the Eighth. The abbots were persons of very great importance in this part of the country; and though ranking below the bishops, they

enjoyed privileges and wielded powers which fell to the lot of very few of those dignitaries. In the time of Bede, it is supposed that Chertsey and its abbey were surrounded by water, from that venerable author's naming it Ceroti Insula. The abbey had great possessions on the Surrey shore of the Thames, and the abbot lived like a feudal chief. Within its cloisters Henry the Sixth,

Poor key-cold figure of a holy king,
Pale ashes of the house of Lancaster!

was buried without any funeral pomp. The body was taken from the Tower, on the morning after his death, and carried through the streets to Cornhill, accompanied by a troop of soldiers, such as usually attended great criminals to the place of execution. It was the popular belief at the time, and for many years after, that the royal corpse bled afresh at St. Paul's and Blackfriars, where the procession stopped; a tradition which Shakspeare has put into the mouth of the Lady Anne, where she exclaims, in the exasperation of her grief at the presence of his murderer,

"See, see! dead Henry's wounds

Open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh!
Blush blush! thou lump of foul deformity!
For 'tis thy presence that exhales this blood
From cold and empty veins!"

Stowe says, that at Blackfriars the body, bare-faced in an open coffin, was put on board a boat and rowed up the river to Chertsey Abbey; and Grafton, that it was buried there, "without priest or clerk, torch or taper, singing or saying." It was afterwards removed to Windsor; some say by Richard the Third, and others, by Henry the Seventh, and re-interred with royal pomp in a new vault in the chancel at the south door of the chapel.

It was to Chertsey that the poet Cowley retired in a fit of disgust at the unmerited neglect of royalty. Hope deferred had made his heart sick; he had taken a physician's degree, and fully qualified himself for the office of master of the Hospital of the Savoy, which had been promised him both by Charles the First and Charles the Second, but his claims were passed over at the Restoration. In a querulous poem written at this time, he says,

"Kings have long hands, they say, and though I be
So distant, that may reach at length to me!"

Broad as was the hint, the Court took no notice of him. To add to his vexation, his old and favourite comedy of "The Guardian," which he had re-modelled, under the title of "Cutter of Coleman-street," and produced upon the

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stage, was treated with great severity, and alleged by his enemies to be a satire upon that Court, from which he still expected favours. He was taunted at the same time in some satirical verses, on the choice of a Laureate as the "Savoy-missing Cowley, making apologies for his bad play;" and as the author, and still worse, the printer of those pitiful verses, inscribed to "His Melancholy." The desire of solitude came strongly upon him; he pretended that he was weary of the "hum of men," satiated with the vile arts of courtly life, and anxious to inhale the fresh breezes of the fields and to live a life of study and seclusion, among hills and woods, and pleasant streams. He therefore withdrew from London; first to Barnes Elms, where he caught a violent cold that never left him; and then to Chertsey. But "O fallacem hominem spem!" he carried with him into his retirement the discontent which is the bane of society, and in a still greater degree that of seclusion; he forgot that happiness was in the mind, and not in circumstances; and the consequence was, that he was more miserable than before. He had changed all the habits of his previous life, and was too old to acquire new ones; he had left his former friends, and was too morose and unaccommo

dating, too ill at ease within himself, to take the trouble of attracting others, and he pined away daily. In a letter to Dr. Sprat, quoted by Dr. Johnson, as a warning to all those who may pant for solitude, while led away by florid and poetical descriptions of its charms, he says, that the first night he settled in Chertsey, he caught a violent cold that confined him to his chamber for ten days, and that he afterwards bruised his ribs by a fall in his fields, which rendered it difficult for him to turn in his bed. He could get no money from his tenants, and his meadows were eaten up every night by cattle turned in to prey upon him by his neighbours. After a discontented residence of two years, during which, however, he composed his two last "Books of Plants," and planned several other works, he died of a violent defluction and stoppage in the throat, which he caught by staying too long in the evening among his haymakers in the meadows. Charles the Second, true to the character so well and wittily bestowed upon him, of "never doing a wise thing, nor ever saying a foolish one," neglected Cowley, and broke his repeated promises to him during his life, but said, on the news of his death reaching him, "that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind him