In London itself, though in the old rustic road towards a suburb of note
where in the days of William Shakespeare, author and stage-player, there
were Royal hunting-seats--howbeit no sport is left there now but for
hunters of men--Bleeding Heart Yard was to be found; a place much
changed in feature and in fortune, yet with some relish of ancient
greatness about it.
Two or three mighty stacks of chimneys, and a few
large dark rooms which had escaped being walled and subdivided out of
the recognition of their old proportions, gave the Yard a character.
It was inhabited by poor people, who set up their rest among its faded
glories, as Arabs of the desert pitch their tents among the fallen
stones of the Pyramids; but there was a family sentimental feeling
prevalent in the Yard, that it had a character.
As if the aspiring city had become puffed up in the very ground on which
it stood, the ground had so risen about Bleeding Heart Yard that you
got into it down a flight of steps which formed no part of the original
approach, and got out of it by a low gateway into a maze of shabby
streets, which went about and about, tortuously ascending to the level
again. At this end of the Yard and over the gateway, was the factory of
Daniel Doyce, often heavily beating like a bleeding heart of iron,
with the clink of metal upon metal. The opinion of the Yard was divided
respecting the derivation of its name. The more practical of its inmates
abided by the tradition of a murder; the gentler and more imaginative
inhabitants, including the whole of the tender sex, were loyal to the
legend of a young lady of former times closely imprisoned in her chamber
by a cruel father for remaining true to her own true love, and refusing
to marry the suitor he chose for her. The legend related how that the
young lady used to be seen up at her window behind the bars, murmuring a
love-lorn song of which the burden was, 'Bleeding Heart, Bleeding Heart,
bleeding away,' until she died.
It was objected by the murderous party
that this Refrain was notoriously the invention of a tambour-worker, a
spinster and romantic, still lodging in the Yard. But, forasmuch as all
favourite legends must be associated with the affections, and as many
more people fall in love than commit murder--which it may be hoped,
howsoever bad we are, will continue until the end of the world to be
the dispensation under which we shall live--the Bleeding Heart, Bleeding
Heart, bleeding away story, carried the day by a great majority. Neither
party would listen to the antiquaries who delivered learned lectures in
the neighbourhood, showing the Bleeding Heart to have been the heraldic
cognisance of the old family to whom the property had once belonged.