Turning to the left, instead of proceeding up Newgate street, a
circuitous street took you to Smithfield, so long associated with
stakes and steaks. Thence, when half-way through the forest of pens,
you turned sharp off to the left, and then, after another hundred
yards by a turn to the right, found yourself in a long narrow lane,
called Charter-House lane. This brought you presently to some iron
gates admitting you to a quaint and not very mathematical quadrangle,
such as you would never have dreamed of stumbling upon there. This
is Charter-House Square, which, still intensely respectable, was once
eminently fashionable. At one corner of it is a little recess known as
Rutland Square, for on this site once stood the abode of the dukes of
that ilk, and near to it is a stately mansion with a high pitched roof
which was in days long gone the residence of the Venetian ambassador.
A garden occupies the centre of the square. Everything is neat,
orderly and severely dull, the most dissipated tenants of the square
being boarding-house keepers of a highly sedate description. The
secret of all this tremendous respectability is to be found in the
contiguity to the Charter-House itself, a portion of whose buildings
abut on the square, which, with many of the streets adjoining, belongs
to this wealthy institution. Four years ago the place was so secluded
that a stranger to London might have walked around the spot a dozen
times without suspecting its existence, and living in one of its
comfortable old mansions supposed himself in the cathedral close of
a provincial city. The entrance to the Charter-House itself is under
an archway through venerable oaken portals, which are said--and there
seems no reason to question the statement--to be the identical gates
of the monastery which occupied the ground in the time of Henry VIII.
This monastery had been a religious house of the Carthusians.[2] The
order first came to England in 1180, and was seated at a place called
Witham Priory[3] in Somersetshire, to this day known as Charter-House