Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

s of our early merchant princes and adventurers in some of the old City churches, and it glimmers upon you that if ever the histor

in Richard the First's time, when that fine spirit, the first of English demagogues, William Fitzosbert, was haranguing the folkmoot in St. Paul's Churchyard, urging them to resist the tyrannic taxations of the Lord Mayor and his Court of wealthy Aldermen-a passion for justice that brought him into such danger that he and certain of his friends had to seek sanctuary, and barricaded themselves in Bow Church. The church was fired by ord

The Temple, Newgate Street, Aldersgate, Lombard Street, Cloth Fair, Paternoster Row, Holborn, Bishopsgate, and a hundred others. You have only to walk into Whitefriars Street and see "Hanging-sword Alley" inscribed on the wall of a court at the top of a narrow flight of steps, and all Alsatia rises again around you,

Leathersellers' Buildings which I satisfied myself was the identical place in which Robert Bloomfield worked as a shoemaker's assistant; Devereux Court still retains something of the Grecian Coffee-house that used to be frequented by Addison and Steele, but I knew the Court first, and am still drawn t

ugh) more recently described it as "always the purse, seldom the head, and never the heart of England." Later still an eminent speaker, quoting this fantastic dictum of Stubbs's, went a step further and informed his audience that "not many men eminent in literature have

leased a home for himself in Aldgate, he held office as a Comptroller of Customs, and the pen that was presently to write the Canterbury Tales "moved over

n, my most k

this life's firs

other place I

dleton, were also Londoners by birth; Sir Thomas Browne, author of the Religio Medici, was born in the parish of St. Michael-

rld in Fleet Street, at the corner of Chancery Lane. But Cowley was a renegade; he acquired an unnatural preference for the country, a

inks

r London l

thee too,

fit to laug

estate

icked men fro

fools that c

o dost thy mi

s than Isling

tude a

N M

oetical fancies when, in some lines to his friend Endymion Porter, he praised the country with its "nut-brown mirth and russet wit,

ity, for exc

y's sweet

, turn to that enraptured outburst

pirit I come,

sed place of

ple! manners f

ustoms, kindre

-born Roman

gst you liv

is, though by

and irksom

d back, hencefo

ntry! reposs

an I'll to th

e first here to

ad in London than alive in the West of England. Even

AY. MIDDL

s of them all, Charles Lamb in Crown Office Row, Temple. He refers, in one of his essays, to Hare Court, in the Temple, and says: "It was a gloomy, churchyard-like court, with three trees and a pump in it. I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old." The pump is no longer there, only one half of Hare Court remains as it was in Lamb's day, and Crown Office Row has been rebuilt. His homes in Mitre Court Buildings and Inner Temple Lane have vanished also; but the Templ

came whereas th

emmes broad age

udious lawyers h

ont the Templar

ecayed thro

"it is the most elegant

OMB. WESTMI

of joy in so much life." Again, "Fleet Street and the Strand," he writes to Manning, "are better places to live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw." After he had removed to Edmonton, on account of his sister's health, it was to Wordsworth he wrote, saying how he pined to be back again in London: "In dreams I am in Fleet Market, but I

ohn Stuart Mill, Ruskin, Turner, Holman Hunt, Sir Arthur Sullivan-but if we go outside literary Londoners this chapter will end only with the book. Moreover, my purpose is not so much to talk of authors and artists who were born in London, as to give some record of the still survivi