sware that his enemies had on purpose brought her majesty thither to break his gall in sunder with Tantalus' torment, that when she went away he might see death before his eyes; with many such-like conceits. And, as a man transported with passion, he swore 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 *Henry VI., part III.

towards his face. One example is enough to suggest mar painful recollections. When the Duke of Buckingham conducted from his trial to the barge, 'Sir Thomas Lov desired him to sit on the cushions and carpet ordained f him. He said, 'Nay; for when I went to Westminster was Duke of Buckingham; now I am but Edward Bohr. the most caitiff of the world.'* But these exhibitics frequent as they were, occupied little of the thoughts those who were moving upon the Thames, in hundreds boats, intent upon business or amusement. In the begin ning of the seventeenth century the river was at the heig of its glory as the great thoroughfare of London. Howe maintains that the river of Thames hath not her fellow," regard be had to those forests of masts which are perpet ally upon her; the variety of smaller wooden botter playing up and down; the stately palaces that are br upon both sides of her banks so thick; which made diver foreign ambassadors affirm that the most glorious sight the world, take water and land together, was to come up a high tide from Gravesend, and shoot the bridge, to We' minster.' Of the smaller wooden bottoms,' Stow C putes that there were in his time as many as two thousan and he makes the very extraordinary statement, that the were forty thousand watermen upon the rolls of the ce pany, and that they could furnish twenty thousand men the fleet. The private watermen of the court and of th nobility were doubtless included in this large number. is evident, from the representations of a royal processi in the early times of James I., that, even on common oce sions, the sovereign moved upon the Thames with reg pomp, surrounded with many boats of guards and mus

cians.

6

f

The Inns of Court, too, filled as they were not only wit the great practitioners of the law, but with thousands wealthy students, gave ample employment to the wate Upon the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to th

men.

Palatine, in 1613, the gentlemen of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn presented a sumptuous masque at court. These naskers, 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 torch-lights, 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.' † 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 the letter,) notwithstanding the vehement shower, were open: and all the people 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 twentythree 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 *Howes' Continuation of Stow's Annals, p. 1007. + Ellis's Letters, vol. iii. p. 196.

triumph of his enemies, and the pity even of those g men who blamed his obstinacy and rashness: 'I saw him take barge,' says Evelyn, a sad sight.' But let us tum from political changes to those more enduring revoluti which changes of manners produce.

We have before us a goodly folio volume of some six seven hundred pages, closely printed, and containing ab 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 d

John Taylor, the Water-Poet.

but

his tracts in 1630, was literally a Thames waterman. working daily for his bread. The waterman's verses are not so ambitious as those of the Venetian gondolier, Antonie Bianchi, who wrote an epic poem in twelve cantos; 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 sup

posed 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,'

Such a spirit would go far to make a writer whose works would be worth looking at two centuries after the praise or abuse of his contemporaries was forgotten; and so homely John Taylor, amongst the race of satirists and mannerpainters, 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 Bankside; . . . and when the day came that the play should have been performed, the house being filled with a great audience who had 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