Draw such as this, and I'll pronounce thou'lt live."
THE BEAR AT THE BRIDGE FOOT.
This celebrated tavern, situated in Southwark, on the west side of the foot of London Bridge, opposite the end of St. Olave's or Tooley-street, was a house of considerable antiquity. We read in the accounts of the Steward of Sir John Howard, March 6th, 1463-4 (Edward IV.), "Item, payd for red wyn at the Bere in Southwerke, iijd." Garrard, in a letter to Lord Strafford, dated 1633 intimates that "all back-doors to taverns on the Thames are commanded to be shut up, only the Bear at Bridge Foot is exempted, by reason of the passage to Greenwich," which Mr. Burn suspects to have been "the avenue or way called Bear Alley."
The Cavaliers' Ballad on the funeral pageant of Admiral Deane, killed June 2nd, 1653, while passing by water to Henry the Seventh's Chapel, Westminster, has the following allusion:—
"From Greenwich towards the Bear at Bridge foot,
He was wafted with wind that had water to't,
But I think they brought the devil to boot,
Which nobody can deny."
Pepys was told by a waterman, going through the bridge, 24th Feb. 1666-7, that the mistress of the Beare Tavern, at the Bridge foot, "did lately fling herself into the Thames, and drown herself."