Clare Market.—[p. 339.]
Denzil Street was so called by the Earl of Clare in 1682, in memory of his uncle Denzil, Lord Holles, who died 1679-80. He was one of the five members of Parliament whom Charles I. so despotically and so unwisely attempted to seize. The inscription on the south-west wall of the street was renewed in 1796.
Street Characters.—[p. 381.]
It would be impossible to recapitulate the street celebrities from Hogarth’s time to the present day which St. Giles’s has harboured. A writer in Notes and Queries mentions a man who used to sell dolls’ bedsteads, and who was always said to have been the king’s evidence against the Cato Street conspirators. Charles Lamb describes, in his own inimitable way, an old sailor without legs who used to propel his mutilated body about the streets on a wooden framework supported on wheels. He was said to have been maimed during the Gordon riots. But I have now myself to add to the list the most remarkable relic of all. There is (1868?) to be seen any day in the London streets a gaunt grey-haired old blind beggar, with hard strongly-marked features and bushy eyebrows. This is no less a person than Hare the murderer, who years ago aided Burke in murdering poor mendicants and houseless people in Edinburgh, and selling their bodies to the surgeons for dissection. Hare, a young man then, turned king’s evidence and received a pardon. He came to London with his blood money, and entered himself as a labourer under an assumed name at a tannery in the suburbs. The men discovering him, threw the wretch into a steeping-pit, from which he escaped, but with loss of both eyes.
The Seven Dials.—[p. 385.]
Evelyn describes going (Oct. 5, 1694) to see the seven new streets in St. Giles’s, then building by Mr. Neale, who had introduced lotteries in imitation of those of Venice. The Doric column was removed in July 1773, in the hope of finding a sum of money supposed to be concealed under the base. The search was ineffectual; the pillar now ornaments the common at Weybridge. Gay describes Seven Dials, in his own pleasant, inimitable way (circa 1712).
“Where fam’d St. Giles’s ancient limits spread,
An inrailed column rears its lofty head,
Here to seven streets seven dials count the day,
And from each other catch the circling ray;
Here oft the peasant, with inquiring face,
Bewildered trudges on from place to place;
He dwells on every sign with stupid gaze,
Enters the narrow alley’s doubtful maze,
Tries every winding court and street in vain,
And doubles o’er his weary steps again.”[782]
Martinus Scriblerus is supposed to have been born in Seven Dials. Horace Walpole describes the progress of family portraits from the drawing-room to the parlour, from the parlour to the counting-house, from the housekeeper’s room to the garret, and from thence to flutter in rags before a broker’s shop in the Seven Dials.[783] Here Taylor laid the scene of “Monsieur Tonson.”
“Be gar! there’s Monsieur Tonson come again!”
The celebrated Mr. Catnach, the printer of street ballads, lived in Seven Dials. He died about 1847.