BENJAMIN HARRIS AND HIS WIFE PATIENCE. By H. K.
CHAPTER I. THE MERCERS' GARDENS.
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Somewhere about the close of the reign of King Charles the Second, on a fine night in summer, there was a pretty sprinkling of company in the Mercers’ Gardens.
London had been baptised with fire, and was fast rising in more extensive proportions; the bricks of which the new city was built being notably good, and likely to resist such another calamity. The crop of wild mustard which had flaunted on the blackened ruins was almost trodden under foot in new streets and lanes, but the pest-field beyond the Oxford road, with its hedges, still grew green and flowery, undisturbed by mattock and pick-axe for centuries. St. Paul’s was rising in noble proportions, Monmouth House and Southampton House gladdened simple folks’ eyes with their princely splendour—but Clarence House in its rural isolation to the north of Piccadilly, reflecting the disgrace of its founder, was the subject of a quip, and maliciously named Dunkirk House, though the staunch soldier, Albemarle, now owned it, and entertained there, in duchess’s state, the Savoy blacksmith’s daughter, fierce Nan Clarges.
Again, in Craven House, once possessed by kind Sir Robert Drury, Lord Craven had dwelt lately, next door to his royal mistress, Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Queen of Hearts; and some said the mayor’s son, in his prosperity, maintained the king’s daughter in her dependence out of his own generous exchequer.
Among other delights London then boasted various traders’ pleasure-grounds, or pleasances, real gardens at Drury Lane and Spring Gardens, the Grocers’ Gardens and the Mercers’ Gardens, though the splendid Mercers’ church had perished for ever.
Down the shady walks, among the mulberry-trees and the lilacs, passed the groups,—the men in the cloth doublet replacing the velvet of the courtier, the plain collar, the sober hose; the women, though less manageable in their fashions, wearing different shades of the kerchief, folded calêche, or Welsh hat, the petticoat wanting the train, the tight sleeve with the cuff and prim-looking white tippet with its embroidered or lace border. Sometimes finer birds intruded on the scene—a lace cravat, a scented wig, and an insolent eye; or the sweeping skirt, the uncovered neck and the flowing hair of some wanton, young, widowed Countess of Drogheda in search of a handsome, gallant, profligate Wycherley, condemned, by the emptiness of his purse, to consort with the staid inhabitants of the city.
It seemed that pleasure was not the only object in view among the walkers. There were grave talkers and serious faces, and occasionally the air of greeting by appointment; and those business-like traits as could have been told by an individual well acquainted with the scene, were principally shown by members of the Stationers’ Company, whose fortunes were then specially precarious, unless they happened to be of the same way of thinking as burly Sir Roger L’Estrange, in his malignant, savage papers in the “Observator.” “The Protestant Intelligence,” “The Current Intelligence,” and “The Domestic Intelligence,” had been arrested to give place to “The London Gazette“ and its interpreter, the “Observator.”
One of the complainants and protestors with
the Whig’s green bunch of ribbons at his breast, was a young, comely man, though his air was