THE OLD HEATHCOCK..
ALAS, the Old Heathcock is gone ! For many a day it kept its place, heedless of the incongruity of its appearance among the more gaudy but not so picturesque adornments of modern shop architec- ture in the Strand, not far from where Dr. EVENINGSTAR, like a mild and serene constellation, sheds his benign influence over the afflicted with corns and bunions. It was nothing more than the sign of a tavern or oyster-shop, the Old Heathcock ; and yet the competitors for the honour of decorating the Houses of Parliament might have taken a lesson from it. The tenement to which it appertained was one of those with quaint and carved (generally wooden) façades, of which every year diminishes the number, re- ducing street-architecture to a monotonous uniformity, effacing the last vestiges of the times when our ancestors imported bricks from Holland because they could not make good ones themselves, and built houses of clap-board despite the pro- clamations of Privy Councils timorous of fire. Beneath " the shaggy penthouse" of two projecting bay-windows, the Old Heathcock—a specimen, it may be, of the carving of GIBBONS in a frolic mood, or before his talents had attracted the notice of EVELYN—sat ensconced in the centre of a colossal scallop-shell, above what seemed the entrance to a court.
The class of buildings of which the late Old Heathcock deco- rated one, is fast disappearing. About the lower end of Wych Street they are still sufficiently numerous to lend an antique cha- racter to the locality. In Holywell Street, there are three or four; and two tolerable specimens may be seen in the Strand between Somerset House and Arundel Street. In the City there are few or none such ; but they recur in Little Moorfields ; and when we come to Bishopsgate-Without, we again encounter one—the man- sion of Sir PAUL PINDAR, tricked out with paint and plaster, like a battered dowager counterfeiting the smooth plumpness of youth. This type is that of the suburban house of the time of the STUARTS and the Long Parliament. The relics in the Strand carry the imagination back to the time when it was a long straggling suburb ; when Butcher's Row—the place of which, immediately West of Temple Bar, knows it no longer—and Clare Market, still surviv- ing, established just without the liberties, grieved the hearts of the privileged corporation of slayers and venders of beeves within. The shop for Dartmouth mutton and clouted cream, between the churches of St. Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes, is the successor of the country (" foreign " they were called) butchers who pitched their tents in Butcher's Row : it brings the fresh up- land character of the far heaths and vallies of Devon into the heart of the smoky city. It will remain a widowed sentiment, bereaved of its kindred neighbour the Old Heathcock. The most genuine antiquities in London are its taverns ; not the mere shells of stone or brick or wood, but the abstract ideas of them. The spot of ground on which our King's Heads and Turk's Heads—our Spotted Dogs and Old Heathcocks—our Mitres— Swans with double and single necks, and Cocks—now stand, are the spots on which houses of civil refreshment have stood, with the same names, since time beyond which the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. These plots of ground have borne many generations —many successive phoenixes, others yet the same : the "casing air" has there "clipped" in its embraces coffeehouses since the days of Sir DUDLEY NORTH, resorts for sedate smokers since RALEIGH, or " ale-stakes " since before CHAUCER. Men love to tipple as well as to pray where their fathers did. Within the walls, St. Botolph- at- Hawe may be older than the White Hart in its vicinity—the point is doubtful; but when we come to the regions of the Strand and Covent Garden, the superior antiquity of the taverns is beyond a doubt. The King's Head was a favourite resort of grave citizens, and Bobadils from the Low Countries, (the Spanish Legionaries of their day,) while " the tall Maypole yet o'erlooked the Strand," long before " Anne and piety " had ordained, on the spot where that emblem of frolic stood, a church to " collect the saints of Drury Lane."
There is something ideal in the permanence of a tavern ; for the actual heaps of stone and lime undergo more mutations than any other class of houses : their occupants, anxious to please, are great conformers to existing tastes. The permanence of taverns is like that of the British constitution—the name is the same, and the uses are the same, but both form and materials are incessantly changing. It is not often that we find, as in the case of the Old Heathcock, the antiquity of the structure, the external form reminding of the tastes of our thrice-great-grandfathers, combined with the antiquity of that abstraction an old-established tavern. One parts regretfully from such an object ; especially if it stood by the side of one's daily thoroughfare, and had long been familiar. Dingy it was, and possibly uncomfortable to the inmates ; dry-rot might have sapped its strength, and legions of bugs assailing, rendered it no longer tenable : the propriety of pulling it down is undeniable—but not the less grievous. It is no consolation for the loss of a friend to be told he could live no longer.
The Old Heathcock is gone. " We could have better spared a better house." Could it not have been allowed a few days of grace ? Might it not have been left till the Twelfth of August ?
Mr. Disraeli, in a letter to the 7'imes, denies that the Carlton Club has any intention to dissolve, or that he (as had been hinted) was the reporter of the late private meeting of the members of the Club; which he conceives would have been an act of " gross impropriety," " about as flagrant as the impertinence which, without a shadow of founda- tion, presumes to impute its perpetration to " him.
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