‘His grace’s fate sage Cutler could foresee
And well (he thought) advised him “Live like me.”
As well his grace replied, “Like you, Sir John?
That I can do, when all I have is gone.”’
[80] ‘Some account of London,’ by Thos. Pennant, 3rd edition, pp. 372, 373.
[81] In the Public Advertiser for Wednesday, April 21, 1775, it is stated that ‘a trout was catched in the New River, near Sadler’s Wells, which weighed eight pounds and a half.’
[82] This roadway is 1,173 yards in length, and has cost £353,526, but the amount will be diminished by the sale of unused lands. Running under it is a subway for the conveyance of electric lighting, etc., high enough for a man to walk through.
[83] The parish derived its name from a holy well, at which the parish clerks of London used annually to perform a miracle play. Its site was marked by a pump near the south-east corner of Ray Street, an illustration of which is given in Wilkinson’s ‘Londina Illustrata.’ The well still exists a few feet to the north, covered by a massive brick arch, under the floor of No. 18, Farringdon Road—formerly the parish watch-house. This quaint little tenement is now to be let on building lease. The whole neighbourhood seems in old days to have had a reputation for holy and medicinal wells.
[84] In the Post Boy, and in the Flying Post for June, 1697, we are told that ‘Sadler’s excellent steel waters at Islington, having been obstructed for some years, are now opened and current again,’ etc.
[85] At the bar of the Sir Hugh Myddleton tavern there was formerly an interesting portrait group of frequenters of the old Myddleton’s Head, Mr. Rosoman being in the centre.
[86] Pinks’s ‘History of Clerkenwell,’ 2nd edition, p. 427.
[87] Both places are alluded to in an advertisement (dated 1747) of the Mulberry Garden, the site of which, says Pinks, was afterwards covered by the House of Detention. A print of it exists.
[88] The springs thus named were almost on the site of another medicinal spring called Black Mary’s Well or Hole. Dr. Bevis makes them out the same, and suggests that the title by which the latter had been known was a corruption of ‘Blessed Mary’s Hole.’ Other writers seek to derive it from Mary Woolaston—a black woman who about 1680 is supposed to have lived hereabout, by the side of the road, in a circular hut built of stones, and to have leased and sold the waters. According to the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1813, part ii., p. 557, this spring was afterwards enclosed in a conduit by Walter Baynes, Esq., the gentleman who, in 1697, discovered the famous Cold Bath, and who owned, in part at least, the Sir John Oldcastle tavern and gardens hard by. According to a plan of the city and environs of London, as fortified by Parliament in 1642-3, there was a battery and breastwork ‘on the hill E. of Blackmary’s Hole.’