Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

two and a half centuries of time since then have made away with nearly all the rest of it. The Tower still remains; there are parts of the T

ttington in Cloth Fair, the George in Southwark; some dozen of churches, including Westminster Abbey (in whose Jerusalem Chamber the translators of the Bible held their meetings), St. Saviour's, Southwark, St. Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, St. Andrew Undershaft, St. Ethelbur

AMBER. WESTM

se in Aldersgate Street, but there was never a rag of evidence to support the statement. We have no letters of Shakespeare, but we have one or two that refer to him, and one written to him by Richard Quiney, and I think we may infer from this latter that Shakespeare occasionally visited Quiney, who was a vintner, dwelling at the sign of the Bell in Carter Lane. Otherwise, except for a handful of small-beer chronicles about him that were picked up in theatrical circles two or three generations after his death, we had no record of any incident in his London life that brought us into actual personal touch with him

em to London. At this time, Burbage, who was by profession an actor and by trade a carpenter and joiner, was owner and manager of "The Theatre," which stood in Shoreditch near the site of the present Standard Theatre, and close by was a rival house, "The Curtain" (commemorated nowadays by Curtain Road

scorn on the "upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a players hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrie."

of Barclay & Perkins's brewery now stands; and Shakespeare, "being a deserveing man," was taken as one of the partners and received a "chie

n at Mountjoy's shop. In his 'prentice days Stephen seems to have formed some shy attachment to his master's daughter, Mary, but because of his lack of means and prospects, or because he was naturally reticent, he had made no attempt to press his suit, and Madame Mountjoy, seeing how the young people were affected to each other, followed the fashion of the time and persuaded Shakespeare, who had then been living under the same roof with them for six years, to act as match-maker between her and the hesitating lover. She one day laid the case before Shakespeare and asked

en them culminated in Stephen Bellott bringing an action in the Court of Requests in 1612, to recover from his father-in-law a promised dower of sixty pounds and to ensure that Mountjoy carried out an alleged arrangement to bequeath a sum of two hundred pounds to him by his will. At the Record Office Professor Wallace found all the legal documents

deed, that he was still boarding there when he appeared as a witness in the 1612 lawsuit and stated that he had been intimate with the family some "ten years, more or less." Throughout the later of those years he was absent o

s C?sar, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Othello. In the two years following, whilst it is pretty sure he was still dwelling with the Mountjoys, he wrote Macbeth and King Lear, and the fact that he had his hom

M SHAK

ard of St. Olave's. The church, in which the apprentice Stephen was married to Mary Mountjoy, vanished also in the Great Fire and was not rebuilt, and this weedy remnant of the churchyard with its three or four cru

CHURCHYARD.

house instead of on the right one, that was a hundred yards or so away from it. But when Shakespeare issued from Mountjoy's shop you may depend that his feet more frequently trod the ground in the opposite direction; he would go to the left, along Silver Street, into Wood Street, and down the length of that to Cheapside, where, almost fronting the end

ound that has belonged to it since before Chaucer's day. You may enter and see there the quaint effigy of Chaucer's contemporary, Gower, sleeping on his five-century-old tomb; and here and there about the aisles and in the nave are memorials of remembered or forgotten men and women who died wh

John Fletcher, a p

hilip Massinger, str

han either of these, it is on record that on the 31st December 1607, Shakespeare's youngest brother, Edmund, "a pl

e Mountjoys, Ben Jonson and Dekker were living near him in Cripplegate, in which district also resided Johnson the actor, Anthony Munday, and other of Shakespeare's intimates; nearer still, in Aldermanbury, lived Heminges and Condell, his brother actors, who first collected and published his plays after his death: and George Wilkins, at whose inn near St. Sepulchre's Stephen Bellott and h

et, and in Bartholomew Close, and just without them in Bunhill Row, and was brought back within them to be buried in Cripplegate Church. These, and its earlier and many later literary ass

he spot where it stood, and set forth in letters of gold the great names that are inseparable from its story, and first amo

d aside into this famous meeting-place of the immortals of his generation. Everybody is familiar with those rapturous lines in Beaumont's letter to Ben Jonson, "written before he and Master Fletcher came to

is war

of your full M

little wit

ou: for wit i

nnis, which m

mesters! What th

maid! heard wor

d so full of

ry one from wh

put his whole

ved to live a

; then when ther

ough to jus

past, wit that

e city to ta

ancelled; and wh

ir behind us

ake the next

gh but downright

W CLOSE. S

t he was tenanting the Cheapside rooms over Bird-in-Hand

poets dead

ium have

ld or mos

n the Merma

ent it-brought them together in an imaginary winter's night shortly after Shakespeare had departed from them and gone back to Stratford for good. Jonson is of tha

all the pic

ves by woo

loves our

ouds of was

these that,

faces gon

om lips we lo

like a

, common-place street, but when a fog steals quietly through it and spiritualises it to something of the vagueness and grandeur and mystery of poetry it is no longer a mere earthly thoroughfare under the control of the Corporation; it becomes a dream-street in some mist-built city of the clouds, and you feel that at any moment the pavements might thin out and shred away and let you through into starry, illimitable spaces. Where the brown fog

le the barges are still asleep with the gleam of their lamps showing pale in the dawn; and the blurred lights and ghostly buildings of a long city road that is clothed in mystery and transfigured by a brooding, dream-haunted fog. Perhaps this is only because of the dim feeling one has that the stars and the su

LK SHOP. CL