OLD STAGE WAGGON.
“To the west, the scene was broken with hamlets, trees, and country roads. Marylebone and Hyde Park were a royal hunting-ground, with a manor house, where the Earls of Oxford lived in later times. Piccadilly was ‘the road to Reading,’ with foxgloves growing in its ditches, gathered by the simple dealers of Bucklersbury, to make anodynes for the weary-hearted. Chelsea was a village; Pimlico a country hamlet, where pudding-pies were eaten by strolling Londoners on a Sunday. Westminster was a city standing by itself, with its Royal Palace, its Great Hall for banquets and the trial of traitors, its sanctuary, its beautiful Abbey, and its famous Almonry. St. James’s Park was walled with red brick, and contained the palace Henry VIII. had built for Anne Boleyn. Whitehall Palace was in its glory. The Strand, along which gay ladies drove in their ‘crab-shell coaches,’ had been recently paved, and its streams of water diverted. A few houses had made their appearance on the north side of the Strand, between the timber house and its narrow gateway, which then formed Temple Bar, the boundary between London and Westminster, and the church of St. Mary-le-Strand. The southern side was adorned with noble episcopal residences, and with handsome turreted mansions, extending to the river, rich with trees and gardens, and relieved by flashes of sparkling water.
SMITH’S ARMS, BANKSIDE.[2]
“To the south, Lambeth, with its palace and church, and Faux Hall, were conspicuous objects. Here were pretty gardens and rustic cottages. The village of Southwark, with its prisons, its public theatres, its palace, and its old Tabard Inn, had many charms. It was the abode of Shakespeare himself, as he resided in a good house in the Liberty of the Clink, and was assessed in the weekly payment of 6d., no one but Henslowe, Alleyn, Collins, and Barrett, being so highly rated. That part of the Borough of Southwark known as Bankside was not only famous in Shakespeare’s time for its Theatres, but also as the acknowledged retreat of the warmest of the demi-monde!
| “‘And here, as in a tavern, or a stew, He and his wild associates spend their hours.’” —Ben Jonson. |
“We fear our best zeal for the drama will not authorise us to deny that Covent-garden and Drury-lane have succeeded to the Bank-side in every species of fame!