The church of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, has but small claims to beauty of appearance, although rebuilt from the designs of Sir Christopher Wren. The highest praise that may be accorded to it is that of being commodious. The old church escaped the Fire of London only to fall into decay, and in 1686 was, with the exception of the tower, taken down, and replaced by the present building. This tower is a somewhat incongruous affair—the small windows in the lower story contrast oddly with the large ugly ones above; and, with the corner buttresses, betray at once the greater antiquity of this part of the structure. The body of the building, as our sketch will show, is divided into two stories, and is ornamented with a cornice and balustrade. The interior, which is very commodious, has nave, aisles, and a handsome chancel. A gallery ranges on either side, supported by pillars; with a third and upper gallery at the west end of the church for the accommodation of the charity school children. The ceiling is panelled, of large span, and decorated with festoons of fruit and flowers. The chancel is adorned profusely, but the taste which guided the decorations is that of a day happily gone by. The walls are wainscoted, and grained to imitate Sienna marble; paintings and gilding add to the attempted effect. Above the altar is a large window of stained glass, with representations of the Ascension and the Last Supper. The organ is by Harris, and celebrated as the instrument employed in the contest between its celebrated maker and Schmydt, in the Temple Church, when the palm was awarded to the organ of the latter.
With St. Andrew’s, Holborn, three names are connected which possess a sad and mournful interest. In this church was christened, by the name of Richard Savage, the unfortunate son of the inhuman Countess of Macclesfield, by the Earl Rivers. Of the many biographies which our literature has handed down to the present time, perhaps not one could be selected displaying a mother in such unnatural colours, or a son invested with brighter talents more perverted, than we find in Johnson’s life of this unfortunate poet. Legally born to high honours and a good estate, his vicious parent, to gratify the basest passions, proclaimed her own shame and her child’s dishonour; and not content with thus depriving him of those advantages which he had done nothing to forfeit, she carried hatred of the unfortunate child to the most fearful, unnatural, and inexplicable lengths. Hiding him in a mean and low position, she sought to shut out all knowledge of his real parents; and chance having frustrated this design, she declared him dead, to prevent a friend from bequeathing him what would have been a competence—robbing her own offspring, without even the wretched temptation of enriching herself! Not content with even this amount of bitter hatred and deadly injury, she—his mother—absolutely attempted to secure his condemnation and execution for a murder which occurred in a drunken brawl! But the great moralist who undertook the task of biographer of poor Savage, and placed the sad history in his “Lives of the English Poets,” performed a triple duty. He vindicated the memory of his friend—he drew a fearful picture, at once a terror and a warning, to show the fearful shapes into which indulgence of illicit pleasures will warp even a mother’s mind—and he wrought out his own high vocation by displaying with unanswerable force that the daily duties and proprieties of ordinary life cannot be neglected with impunity, and that the systematic neglect of them renders wit contemptible, genius incapable of good, and talent profitless to its possessor.
Another name attached to this spot is one which conjures up sad thoughts and recollections of genius, companioned with misery, neglect, insanity, and early suicide. Chatterton, “Bristol’s boy poet,” met his early fate in a wretched lodging in this parish, and the record of his death stands in the church register. With talents as surprising as precocious, his career was short as melancholy. The fabricator, when a mere boy, of “Rowley’s Poems,” he opened a fruitful field for learned disquisition, into which the chief scholars and antiquaries of the time did not hesitate to enter. Purporting to be productions of the fifteenth century, the imitation was so close, that long and learned controversies were requisite to determine their authenticity; and the fine perception, high poetic feeling, varied imagination, and great antiquarian knowledge they display, are the sure evidences of the bright destiny which might have been Chatterton’s had more fortunate circumstances surrounded him. Seeking in London subsistence as an author, he soon felt the force of those bitter lessons which adversity stores up for those who, with minds capable of high literary exertion, are compelled, friendless and alone, to seek from the press their daily bread. Truly as poetically sings the more fortunate Tom Moore:
“The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
Is always the first to be touched by the thorns;”
and so with poor Chatterton. His mind, keenly susceptible to all impressions, was not fitted to bear the rude rebuffs of trading bibliopoles; and, with philosophy too light and fragile to preserve the intellectual balance, reduced by poverty to the verge of starvation, and—unlike Savage—too proud to beg, he swallowed poison. The spot where he lies buried is now covered by the busy market, which occupies the site of the old grave yard in Shoe-lane; and the entry in the church register is the only local evidence of the death of a poet, who, had his life been longer, would doubtless have obtained one of the highest ranks in his country’s literature.
The third of the literary trio was also unfortunate, and — a suicide; and the similarity of his fate links bis memory, in connection with this church, to those whose lives we have just glanced over. Henry Neele, born in the Strand, in 1798, was in due time articled to an attorney. His taste for literature, however, was stronger than his liking for the law; and, in 1817, during his clerkship, he became an author. His chief works were the “Romance of English History,” and ” Lectures on English Poetry;” but he contributed largely to contemporary magazines; chiefly in the form of short poems and sketches of a romantic and fictitious character. These labours were continued till February 1828, when, in a fit of insanity, in his chambers in the Temple, he put a period to his existence. A stone against the west wall of the church-yard bears the record of his death; the same slab containing lines from his pen, referring to his father who is buried close by. The epitaph is perhaps worth preserving :
“Good night, good night sweet spirit! thou hast cast
Thy bonds of clay away from thee at last;
Broke the vile earthly fetters which alone
Held thee at distance from thy Maker’s throne:
But oh! these fetters to th’ immortal mind,
Were links of love to those thou’st left behind.
For the we mourn not as th’ apostle prest
His dungeon-pillow, till the angel guest
Drew nigh, and when the light that found pun shone,
Beared on the prisoner, ma bands were gone,-
So wert thou captive to disease and pain,
Till death, the brightest of th’ angelic train,
Pour’d heaven’s own radiance, by divine decree,
Around thy suffering soul-and it was free.”
The Illustrated London News, London, England, Week Ending December 17, 1842
