IN the middle ages the great Dominican monastery, which has given the name Blackfriars to the whole locality, stretched from Ludgate almost to the Thames, while on the opposite side of the Fleet, then a broad river, stood the , a residence of Saxon, Norman and Plantagenet kings, rebuilt by . for the reception of . It was given by . to the city for a hospital and endowed with the revenues taken from the Savoy; in Elizabeth's time it became a prison. All that remained of the palace perished in the great fire, and upon the site was erected the notorious gaol which figures in one of the plates of Hogarth's Harlot's Progress.

The monastery was destroyed by the Tudor tyrant, and a church within its precincts, dedicated to St. Anne, was converted into a storehouse for properties used in court entertainments; and here " the Children of Paul's," who had been actors since the days of the

No picture of the theatre, in which many of Shakespeare's masterpieces were first produced, is known to exist; but from contemporary plays, more especially those of Ben Jonson, it is possible to give a vivid presentment of the interior of the building during a performance. The Blackfriars was a private theatrethat is to say, it was chiefly supported by noble patrons, who subscribed for boxes, and consequently it was conducted with greater decorum than was the Globe

To eyes accustomed to the glare of gas and electric light, the interior, lit up simply by candles, will appear plunged in semi-darkness. A silken curtain, which runs upon an iron rod and opens in the middle, at present conceals the stage. On three sides are tiers of galleries, to which the prices of admission are sixpence and a shilling, and to the small boxes or rooms beneath, two shillings and two and sixpence; these latter are rented by the aristocracy. The pit, in the public theatres, is filled with a noisy, nutcracking, apple-eating, ale-drinking, card-playing, romping, flirting, riotous crowd, whose clamour frequently drowns the voices of the actors; but no such licence is permitted here, nor would those sober citizens who sit attentive on their benches desire it.

In a balcony on one side of the stage are the musicians, who play before the play and between the acts, like the orchestra of a modern theatre; and very excellent music it is, for the musicians pay for the privilege of performing at the Blackfriars, as it recommends them to the nobility.

Hark! there is the triple flourish of trumpets, which announces that the play will now begin, and the curtains are drawn back on each side. As a tragedy is to be represented the stage is hung with black, and like the halls of the nobles, the boards are strewn

Although the actors have not yet appeared, the stage is already half-filled with ladies and gallants, seated upon three-legged stools, some of the gentlemen lying upon the rushes at their ladies' feet and fanning themselves, a la Hamlet and Ophelia. Here we have the jeunesse doree of the court, the Mercutios, the Tybalts, the Romeos, the Benedicks, who in the play will see themselves reflected as in a mirror, just as in the dramas of our day we attempt to show " the very age and body of the time, its form and pressure". We have met the gallants strolling in the aisles of old St. Paul's, and dining at Dick Tarleton's Ordinary, noted their close-cropped hair, their huge ruffs, monstrous trunk-hose, their feet half-hidden by the splendid roses in their shoes. But here are the ladies in their pearled stomachers, their expansive farthingales, stiff with gold and silver embroidery, and their yellowdyed hair and glittering winged ruffs. At the back of each gallant stands a page, a veritable Moth, whose duty it is to keep his master's pipe, moulded in silver or clay into many curious shapes, supplied with tobacco from " fine lily pots " that upon being opened smell like conserve of roses, while between a pair of silver tongs he holds a glowing coal of juniper wood to ignite the Virginian weed, so that the atmosphere resembles that of a modern music hall.

When the curtain at the back is undrawn it reveals

And now the play begins, and proceeds amidst loud comments from the audience, complimentary and otherwise. If they do not like it, there are cries of "mew! " blirt!" "ha, ha!" "light, chaffy stuff!" Would I could describe how Burbage and Will Kempe and Lowin and Shakespeare looked and acted, but of that we have no record; and here the wings of my Pegasus fail him and we drop down upon nineteenth-century ground again.

Whether the postern, from which looked down the

"There happened to be a prisoner there," writes Strype, "one Stephen Foster, who was a cryer at the grate. As he was doing his dolorous office, a rich widow of London hearing his complaint inquired of him what would release him. To which he answered Twenty pound; which she in charity expended; and clearing him out of prison entertained him in her service; who afterwards falling into the way of merchandise, and increasing as well in wealth as courage, wooed his mistress, Dame Agnes, and married her." Then, in , he became Sir Stephen

A famous hostelry in Elizabeth's time, and long before and long afterwards, was La Belle Sauvage ;

There are several explanations of this curious sign. Stow tells us that one Isabella Savage gave it to the Cutlers' Company, whose coat of arms, the Elephant and Castle, is still to be seen upon a stone in the yard. " Mr. Spectator" says that in his time the sign was a savage standing beside a big bell. Or it might have been the union of two separate signs, apprentices, when setting up for themselves, often using their former masters' signs in combination with their own.

Passing into the Old Bailey-a name so ancient that even Stow had to confess his ignorance of its origin, though he supposes it to have been derived from some antique court that was held there-we come upon that great gloomy house of terror, the silent remembrancer of centuries of sin and suffering, and the vengeance of the law. Newgate, the old Elizabethan chronicler informs us, was erected in the reign of Henry I. or Stephen, and, like all the other city gateways, served as a gaol. The story of Newgate prison has filled good-sized volumes, and cannot even be glanced at here: it has been well told by Major Griffiths in his Chronicles of Newgate. Of the awful condition of the old gaol, even as late as , he relates the following anecdote: " At the May Sessions of

The strangest feature, however, in the criminal history of the eighteenth century is that these atrocious miscreants, as soon as they were condemned to death, became heroes, and men and women of the first fashion rushed to visit them in the condemned cell. Walpole, in one of his letters to Horace Mann (18th October, ), writes: " Robbing is the only thing that goes on with any vivacity, though my friend M'Lean [a notorious highwayman] is hanged. The first Sunday after his condemnation three thousand people went to see him; he fainted away twice in the heat of his cell. You can't conceive the ridiculous rage there is of going to Newgate; and the prints that are published of the malefactors, and the memoirs of their lives and deaths." More than half a century previously Claude Duval had been equally honoured: when he was captured, dames of the highest rank visited him, and interceded for his pardon ; after his execution the corpse lay in state with all the pomp of wax-lights and black

The old prison perished in that terrible conflagration raised by the Gordon rioters in , of which no finer picture can be found than that given by Charles Dickens in Barnaby Rudge. Something yet remains, however, of ancient Newgate, in some heavy, lowarched cellars, without any means of ventilation, which might have been the veritable cells in which the hundred prisoners were confined, or Jack Sheppard himself. And the condemned cell has more than a hundred years of ghastly traditions. During the first half of the nineteenth century the rage for seeing criminals hanged was as great as that for visiting them in the eighteenth, and the owners of the houses opposite the place of execution made fabulous sums by letting their windows to sight-seers. Vide the Ingoldsby ballad of Lord Tom Noddy.

Glancing up Newgate Street our eyes fall upon another landmark of old London which has been doomed by the iconoclast, Christ Hospital. It is a pity to break up such a noble mass of traditions as those associated with the old school.

What a host of memories has gathered about that small spot of ground on which, in the early decades of the thirteenth century, the Franciscans within a few years after the order was first established () built a monastery! In the Greyfriars was one of the most splendid churches in London. Stow gives an enormous list of illustrious personages, including queens and the daughters of kings and great nobles, who were interred there, and of nine monuments of marble and alabaster in the choir alone, and seven score gravestones of marble, all of which were thereafter sold by a zealous reformer, one Alderman Sir Martin Bowes, for £50! Among the notable dead was Isabella, "the she-wolf of France," queen of Edward II., and there was a tradition among the bluecoat boys that her ghost walked the ancient cloister that had once formed part of the church.

It is generally supposed that the school was founded by Edward VI., whose apocryphal reputation for such like acts of beneficence has been so ruthlessly dissipated by recent historical investigations; but Christ Hospital was founded by Henry VIII. in the thirty-eighth year of his reign-it is unjust to ignore one of the very few good acts of the Tudor despot-and the grant was only confirmed by his son.

The roll of scholars and great men who received their training at this fine old school is a noble one; to mention but a few: Stillingfleet, Samuel Richardson,

The discipline of the upper school under the Rev. James Boyer was Spartan. " He had two wigs .... The one serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening a mild day. The other, an old, discoloured, unkempt, angry caxton, denoting frequent and bloody execution. Woe to the school when he made his morning appearance in his passy or passionate wig . . . Nothing was more common than to see him make a headlong entry into the schoolroom from his inner recess or library, and with turbulent eye singling out a lad, roar out, 'Ods my life, sirrah! I have a great mind to whip you !'-then, with a sudden and retracting impulse, fling back into his lair, and after a cooling lapse of some minutes drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been some devil's litany, with the expletory yell 'and I WILL too !' In his gentler moods, when rabidus furor was assuaged, he had resort to an ingenious method, peculiar, from what I have heard, to himself, of whipping the boys and reading the debates in the newspaper at the same time; a paragraph and a lash between."[5] 

Here is a picture, from the same charming pen, of an illustrious schoolmate: " Come back into my memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee-the

How remote those old bare-footed friars, those royalties and great nobles appear to be from us of to-day, and yet their ashes lie within a few feet of the crowded pavement of Newgate Street, while the very stones are still haunted for us by the spirits of men who yet live and breathe in their immortal thoughts!

Christ Hospital is not the only place in Newgate Street associated with memories of Lamb and Coleridge. On the south side, nearer to Cheapside, stood, until burned down in , a notable old tavern called the Salutation and Cat.[6]  It is now rebuilt as a modern public house and restaurant. During the eighteenth century it was a favourite rendezvous of literary men, especially of Richardson the novelist,

It is but a step down King Edward Street, formerly Butcherhall Lane, into that quaint corner of old London, to which the Earls of Brittany, who lodged there in ancient times, gave the name Little Britain. In days gone by it was a " Booksellers' Row " filled

Back and side go bare, go bare,

Both foot and hand go cold;

But belly god send thee good ale enough,

Whether it be new or old.

[1] "The Children of Paul's," who figure so largely in the dramatic history of Elizabeth's and James's reigns, were the choristers of the cathedral. Plays were frequently represented by them, not only in their schools and in the private theatres, but sometimes at court. The Blackfriars, before it was taken over by Burbage and his partners, seems to have been devoted entirely to their use. The players were very jealous of their popularity, and it is to them that Hamlet alludes in the lines: "There is, sir, an aery of children, little eye-asses, that cry out on the top of the question, and are most tyrannically clapped for't; these are now the fashion," etc., etc. See Hamlet, iii. 2.

[2] Whether or not scenery was used in these private theatres is a point by no means certain. Considering the wonderful scenic effects which were common in the court "masques" (see Ben Jonson's Masques), I think it more than probable; how otherwise can we understand the stage directions in the plays of the period which indicate not only scenes but sets? This is no place to enter into such a discussion, but let the reader take up his Shakespeare, or Jonson, or indeed any Elizabethan dramatist, and consider the matter for himself.

[3] Prisoners still begged at the grating of the Fleet in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

[4] Newspapers, journals and gossip of this time are full of references to the anarchical condition of the London streets and suburbs, and the daring robberies and deeds of violence daily and nightly perpetrated in them. There is an advertisement in The Public Ledger, in 1744, stating that on certain nights a horse patrol would be stationed on the new road between the Sadler's Wells and Grosvenor Square for the protection of visitors to the Wells. I shall have more to say upon this subject when I come to Bow Street.

[5] Coleridge, however, admitted that he owed great obligations to this Gamaliel, who flogged infidelity and false taste in poetry out of him.

[6] The Salutation means the Annunciation, and was figured by an Angel appearing to the Virgin. The addition of the Cat can only be explained by such a combination of signs as is explained in my note upon La Belle Sauvage.