Streets in St. Giles’s.—[p. 385.]
In Dyot Street lived Curll’s “Corinna,” Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, and her mother.[784] At the Black Horse and Turk’s Head public-houses in this street, those wretches Haggerty and Holloway, in November 1802, planned the murder of Mr. Steele on Hounslow Heath, and here they returned after the perpetration of the crime. At the execution of these murderers at the Old Bailey, in 1807, twenty-eight persons were trampled to death. The street was immortalised by a song in Bombastes Furioso, an excellent and boisterous burlesque tragic opera, written by William Barnes Rhodes, a clerk in the Bank of England. Bainbridge and Breckridge Streets, St. Giles’s, now no more, were built prior to 1672, and derived their names from the owners, eminent parishioners in the reign of Charles II. Dyot Street was inhabited as late as 1803 by Philip Dyot, Esq., a descendant of Richard Dyot, from whom it derived its name. In 1710 there was a “Mendicants’ Convivial Club” held at the Welsh’s Head in this street. The club was founded in 1660, when its meetings were held at the Three Crowns in the Poultry. Denmark Street was probably built in 1689. Zoffany lived at No. 9. Bunbury, the caricaturist, laid the scene of his “Sunday Evening Conversation” in this street. In July 1771 Sir John Murray, the Pretender’s secretary, was carried off in a coach from his house near St. Giles’s Church by armed men.[785]
Saint Giles.—[p. 385.]
This saint has some scurvy worshippers. Pierce Egan, in his Life in London (1820), afterwards dramatised, describes the thieves’ kitchens and beggars’ revels, which men about town in those days thought it “the correct thing,” as the slang goes, to see and share. “The Rookery” was a triangular mass of buildings, bounded by Bainbridge, George, and High Streets. It was swept away by New Oxford Street. The lodgings were threepence a night. Sir Henry Ellis, in 1813, counted seventeen horse-shoes nailed to thresholds in Monmouth Street as antidotes against witches. Jews preponderate in this unsavoury street. Mr. Henry Mayhew describes a conversation with a St. Giles’s poet who wrote Newgate ballads, Courvousier’s Lamentation, and elegies. He was paid one shilling each for them. A parliamentary report of 1848 describes Seven Dials as in a degraded state. “Vagrants, thieves, sharpers, scavengers, basket-women, charwomen, army seamstresses, and prostitutes, compose its mass. Infidels, chartists, socialists, and blasphemers have their head-quarters there. There are a hundred and fifty shops open on the Sunday. The ragged-school there is badly situated and uninviting.” Mr. Albert Smith says gin shops are the only guides in “the dirty labyrinth” of the Seven Dials. The author once accompanied a Scripture-reader to some of the lowest and poorest courts and alleys of St. Giles’s. In one bare room, he remembers, on an earth floor, sat a blind beggar waiting for the return of his boy, a sweeper, who had been sent out to a street-crossing to try and earn some bread. In another room there was a poor old lonely woman who had made a pet of an immense ram. We ended our tour by visiting an Irishwoman who had been converted from “Popery.” While we were there, some Irish boys surrounded the house and shouted in at the key-hole, threatening to denounce her to the priest. When we emerged from this den we were received with a shower of peculiarly hard small potatoes, a penance which the author bore somewhat impatiently, while the Scripture-reader, who seemed accustomed to such rough compliments, took the blows like an early Christian martyr.
Lincoln’s Inn Hall.—[p. 398.]
In 1800 or 1801 Mackintosh delivered lectures in the old Lincoln’s Inn Hall on the “Laws of Nature and Nations.” They were attended by Canning, Lord Liverpool, and a brilliant audience. They contained a panegyric on Grotius. In style Mackintosh was measured and monotonous—of the school of Robertson and Gilbert Stuart. He made one mistake in imputing the doctrine of the association of ideas to Hobbes, which Coleridge corrected. He refuted the theories of Godwin in a masterly way.[786]
Serle Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.—[p. 401.]
This street derived its name from a Mr. Henry Serle, who died intestate circa 1690, much in debt, and with lands heavily mortgaged. He purchased the property from the executors of Sir John Birkenhead, the conductor of the Royalist paper, Mercurius Aulicus, during the Civil War, a writer whose poetry Lawes set to music, and who died in 1679. New Square was formerly called Serle’s Court, and the arms of Serle are over the Carey Street gateway. The second edition of Barnaby’s Journal was printed in 1716, for one Illidge, under Serle’s Gate, Lincoln’s Inn, New Square.[787] Addison seems to have visited Serle’s Coffee-house, to study from some quiet nook the “humours” of the young barristers. There is a letter extant from Akenside, the poet, addressed to Jeremiah Dyson, that excellent friend and patron who defended him from the attacks of Warburton at Serle’s Coffee-house.
Christian Knowledge Society.—[p. 414.]
The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, now at 66 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, had apartments in 1714 at No. 6 Serle’s Court. This society was founded by Dr. Bray and four friends on the 8th of March 1699, and it celebrated its third jubilee, or 150th anniversary, in 1849. The society assists schools and colonial churches, and is said to have distributed more than a hundred millions of Bibles and Prayer-books since its foundation.