The Eel-Pie (or Sluice) House Tavern has sometimes been confused with the Sluice House proper, a wooden building contiguous to it. The New River Company had one of their sluices here, and the house was tenanted by two of their walksmen or inspectors; view in Hone’s Every Day Book, 1826, p. 696.
[44a] Sylvester (or Silvester) was one of the claimants to the invention of the optical ghost illusion well known as ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ at the Polytechnic (Frost’s Lives of the Conjurors, pp. 314, 329).
[44b] J. Greenwood’s chapter is headed ‘Johnson’s Retreat.’ It may be doubtful whether it is intended for Weston’s, or for some other similar resort in the north of London.
[46a] Boyne’s Trade Tokens, ed. Williamson, ii., p. 817, No. 61. An eighteenth-century proprietor named Holmes died in 1744.
[46b] Green in 1823, 1832, etc.
[47] On August 29, 1811, Sadler ascended from the Mermaid with Mr. H. Beaufoy; cf. Tyssen Library Catalogue (Hackney, 1888), pp. 6, 8, Journal of Aerial Voyage, etc.
[48a] Stone pillars used as targets and called by various quaint names—Jehu, Old Absoly, Bob Peak, the Castle, etc. They were placed in the fields at unequal distances, like the ‘holes’ in a golf-course, and the archers passed from one to another.
[48b] It is marked in a Finsbury Fields map of 1737.
[48c] London Evening Post, August 4 to 7, 1764.
[49] Hazlitt’s Indian Jugglers. Cavanagh declared that in this contest he played with his clenched fist.