 CHAPTER 17 THE CHURCH AND THE END It completes, so to say, the dignity of Piccadilly, that St. James's church should stand in it. And it is fitting, I think, that with the church my book should end, for whatever better and happier thoughts a church may suggest to others, to me at least it means first and last and insistence on mortality. It is always sad to come to the end of a thing one loves, and in parting from Piccadilly, which has been a labour of love to me to write about, I cannot but feel a sorrow not altogether sweet. St. James's church and the memorials of its dead are not an unfit theme for my last chapter. Not that the personal associations of the church are all melancholy by any means. Harry German, who owned the ground on which it is built, was only sad in another sense, and so was Charles II, who issued the letter's patent for it. Yet death, in a way, presided over its beginning, for both Harry German, made Earl of St. Albans and privately married to Henrietta Maria, and Charles himself, died while it was building. It was finished and consecrated in 1685. To enter on an architectural disquisition on its merits is happily not part of my duty. The reader probably knows them, or he can go see for himself. I do not think it, Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece, or fancy that his ghost haunts it in preference to St. Paul's, quite the other way, in fact, for he had architectural troubles in connection with it. The steeple he designed was judged to be too expensive, and one designed by a carpenter in the parish called Wilcox, which cost £100 less, was preferred. Bitter thoughts of Wilcox must occur to Wren if he revisits his work. But he was proud of the interior, and surely with justice. I know many churches more sympathetic to me, but the symmetry of the columns and roof, the whole fashioned with a sort of fine simplicity to seat as many worshippers as possible with the means at the architect's command, contents our vision. The adornments I care for less, but will not dogmatise about taste. From the first, since James's church was fashionable, and its memories are mainly of fashionable folk and their ways, in Sir John Vambrer's relapse, which was produced ten years or so after the church was finished, Lord Foppington, the type of all that was modish, tells us what sort of congregations sat there. Foppington, why faith, madam? Sunday is a vile day, I must confess. I intend to move for leave to bring in a bill that players may work upon it, as well as the hackney coaches. Though this I must say for the government, it leaves us the churches to entertain us. But there again they begin so abominably early a man must rise by candlelight to get dressed by the psalm. Verinthia, pray, which church does your lordship most oblige by your presence? Foppington. Oh, St. James's, madam, there's much the best company. Amanda. Is there good preaching, too? Foppington. Why, faith, madam, I can't tell. A man must have very little to do there that can give an account of the sermon. Verinthia. You can give us an account of the ladies, at least. Foppington. Oh, I deserve to be excommunicated. There is my lady Tatl, my lady Prate, my lady Titta, my lady Lear, my lady Giggle, and my lady Grinn. These sit in the front of the boxes, and all church-time are the prettiest company in the world, step, my vitals. May unto be hope for the honour to see your ladyship added to our society, madam? Amanda. Alas, my lord, I am the worst company in the world at church. I'm apt to mind the prayers of the sermon. What? Foppington. One is indeed strangely apt at church to mind what one should not do. But I hope, madam, at one time or another I shall have the honour to lead your ladyship to your coach, there. I have copied out the whole passage, because it gives us more vividly and truly than I can hope to, an idea of the church and its worshippers, as it was when it first was used. We see the fine ladies sitting under grinning Gibbons' altarpiece, and my lord ogling them, and leading his favourite to her coach. Carefully the while, how curious are those changing affectations, mispronouncing his o's. He led her, by the way, not into Piccadilly, but into German Street, on which the church then fronted as the more important street of the two. It is possible that if my lord Foppington had listened to the sermon, he would not have understood it. But it is probable he would have heard a good one. The preferment has usually been held, one of the prizes of the church, and many of the incumbents have been made bishops. A few archbishops. Archbishop Tennyson was the first rector. Lord Foppington sat under Dr William Wake, Dee Dee, who also became Archbishop of Canterbury in due time. None of these incumbents, I hope and think, is likely to haunt the worldly scene of Piccadilly, though perhaps some of them like to linger now and then, in the pleasant rectory house, which suggests a dignified domesticity, and seems out of place in that part of Piccadilly, now so little domestic. One of the curates, however, was so much at home in Piccadilly, or wherever else fate bestowed him, that I must, by no manner of means, exclude him from my pages. I mean the late Prebendery Brookfield, that gay and accomplished humorist father of Mr Charles Brookfield, the player and playwright, who was curate under John Edward Kemp. Prebendery Kemp died at the age of 97, on the day I wrote this chapter. He used to relate how the Lord Darby, who was Prime Minister, sat in a gallery pew right over the pulpit, and would write notes for a speech there, sometimes looking over the rector's shoulder to see if the sermon was near its end, end footnote. Those of my readers, and I hope this means all of them, who have read the book Mr Charles Brookfield and his wife wrote about the former's parents, will perceive at once that Prebendery Brookfields, I say it without the least offence to his clerical character, is one of the most delightful ghosts they could meet in Piccadilly, and quite in touch with most of the spirits I have imagined there. So human was he, so sympathetic and debonair, his sermons in the church drew London, one of them in which some incautious mistrust of the literal acceptance of divine writ was expressed, caused almost a scandal, and the good Lord's shaft spree protested that the man's an atheist. They were strikingly dramatic in tone, as one who used to hear them has told me, and indeed in Mr Brookfield the father, a fine actor was lost to the stage. It is recorded that he once kept a party in Trinity Cambridge. It included the great Dr Thompson and other serious and mature persons rolling on the floor in laughter for an hour with his comic deliveries. He was of course an eagerly sought guest at great men's tables, and among others that in Bath House, Piccadilly saw him often. There was a touch of the abbey parson about him, just a suggestion of Thackeray's reverend Samson, pour le bon motif, as it were. Could I leave out such a jolly spirit as this? The reader would never forgive me, but he must forgive me if I do no more than mention a few of the celebrated people who were christened or buried in St James's church. Their connection with Piccadilly is not sufficient for my rules. If the reader's imagination is equal to the picture of Lord Chesterfield, him of the letters and the manners and morals, Dr Johnson so bitterly described, of the famous Lord Chesterfield as a polite baby, I can gratify him with the knowledge that here Lord Chesterfield was christened, so was the first William Pitt, who should have been a still more remarkable baby. Mrs Delaney, who lived so long and knew so many people, was buried here in 1788. James Doddley, the bookseller, lies here, and James Gilraith, the caricaturist, who threw himself from the window of Miss Humphrey's print shop in St James's street hard by. Tom Durfey was buried here, and Dick Steele had placed a tablet with Honest Tom Durfey on it at the entrance to the church in German Street. Mr Wheatley tells us that the tablet was taken down some years ago as unsuited to the sanctity of the place. It is not recorded, however, that the remains of old Q have been removed from underneath the altar. And now I come to the end. Like most goodbyes, this too is best said quickly. I confess to some sentiment in the moment. In spite of the horrors which an evil-inspired and absurdly called civilisation inflicts on the place now, I still feel something of the charm of Piccadilly, and I have laboured my best in gratitude. Well or ill, the work is done, and the ghostly figures fade. One looks after them as they go, sadly. One self to fade also sooner or later, and be like, since the life of the dead is in the memory of the living, to fade far more completely. Harriet Mellon and Emma Hamilton, Fox and Byron, the Duke and Palmerston, and old Q. I take my leave of them, and Frederick Locker-Lampson gives me a too-sadly fitting envoy for its Hale-Ani Fugakes, the wise and the silly, old P or old Q. We must quit Piccadilly. THE END OF CHAPTER 17 AND THE END OF THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY by G. S. STREET