From all which, and much more to the same purport, one may judge that whether in Ben Jonson’s time or Browning’s, whether in Smithfield or in the modern charity fair, the art of alluring or browbeating the man with a purse into buying what he does not want is much the same. Long after Milton’s death, the fair was famous, and drew gaping throngs to witness mountebanks swing in mid air, and to view the fat woman and double-headed calf, for all the world like “The Greatest Moral Show on Earth” to-day.
Now Smithfield has banished mountebanks and bellowing herds. Only the carcases of the latter may be found in the huge brick market that covers a large part of the once open space. The original size of Smithfield was but three acres, but since 1834 it has been over six acres in extent.
CHAPTER XIII.
ELY PLACE.—INNS OF COURT.—TEMPLE CHURCH.—COVENT GARDEN.—SOMERSET HOUSE
olborn was paved long before Milton’s birth, and was a street of consequence, because of the Inns of Court, which opened north and south from it. From his time until 1868 a row of small houses southward from Gray’s Inn blocked up the street, and became even in his day “a mighty hindrance to Holborn in point of prospect.”
Ely Place, off Holborn, is little known to hasty tourists who have not time to leave the beaten track of sightseeing. But any one who has a quiet hour to spend in the exquisite little church of St. Etheldreda, and to recall the glories of the past which its Gothic walls have witnessed, will be well repaid.
Ely Place, a rectangle of dull, commonplace houses, at its entrance gives no glimpse of the chapel, which is shrinkingly withdrawn a little among the interloping walls that now replace the gardens and the palaces of Milton’s day. In Chaucer’s lifetime, the Bishop of Ely built this very chapel to the Saxon saint, the daughter of the king of the West Angles, who was born about the year 630. She took part in the erection of the Cathedral of Ely amid the morasses of the “Fen” country, and was chosen as its patron saint. In 679 she died, the abbess of the convent of Ely. Singularly enough, this modest lady gave the origin to the word “tawdry,” so Thornbury declares. For her name was sometimes called St. Audry, and some cheap necklaces sold at St. Audry’s fair at Ely were known as “tawdry” laces, whence the name was applied to other cheap and showy ornaments.