In a house in Bunhill Row, whose site is covered now by the offices of a company of well-diggers, John Milton died in 1674. Over the doorway there is a tablet marking the spot. Milton moved here in 1664, the street then being called Artillery Walk, from the nearby Artillery Grounds. Here he wrote the last part of "Paradise Lost," and made arrangements for its publication, by which he was to receive five pounds down, with the further promise of an additional five pounds if an edition of 1300 was sold, and still another five pounds if still another edition of 1300 was sold. Here, too, he wrote "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes."
Facing the eastern entrance to Bunhill Fields, in City Road, is the chapel built in 1778 for John Wesley, the founder and preacher of the Methodist Church; and behind the chapel is the tombstone showing where Wesley was buried in 1791. He died in the house No. 47, next the chapel.
A commemorative window in the church of St. James in Curtain Road close by Holywells Street, marks the location of the Curtain Theatre of Shakespeare's time, which stood on the church site. Here, so the tale goes, the première of "Hamlet" was given, and Shakespeare, standing at the door, held the horses of those who attended the performances. But that he did this is not at all certain. Like most of the theatres of that time, this house was so arranged that the roof extended only over the stage and galleries, leaving the central space, or pit, open to the sky. A curtain of silk, running on an iron rod and opening both ways from the middle, hid the stage before the performance began.
All the district about Finsbury Square was once the marshy ground of Moorfields, a promenade of the 18th century. The name Finsbury happened in an old ballad, which tells of a Knight who went to the crusades and who forbade his two daughters to marry until his return. The Knight never came back alive, but his head was sent to the daughters when they had grown old and were still unmarried. This gruesome relic they buried near by their home, and gave their father's name to his resting place, as told in the ballad:
Old Sir John Fines he had the name
Being buried in that place,
Now, since then, called Finsbury,
To his renown and grace;
Which time to come shall not outwear
Nor yet the same deface.
Finsbury Pavement was the promenade of Moorfields, and was for a very long time the one solid roadway in that marshy part of town.
The church of All Hallows-on-the-Wall was built in 1765 on a bastion of the old Roman wall that enclosed old London. Close to the church door at the back of the ancient burying ground, a bit of the wall is still to be seen.
Bishopsgate is one of the few very old streets that escaped the Great Fire. It is strangely narrow, and its hurrying throngs add to the general picturesqueness of the high-roofed structures and the quaint many-angled windows that line its sides.
Where Bishopsgate Within ends and Bishopsgate Without begins a gate was cut through the wall of old London. One part was within the wall and one part without the wall, hence the name of the street. At this gateway were four churches. St. Botolph, Without Bishopsgate, dedicated to the popular English saint, stands on the site of one of those early churches. In this church John Keats, who afterwards wrote so delicately of the Eve of St. Agnes and the Grecian Urn, was baptised.