now about twenty-two years (I have been servant to him when he was prince, and ever since: it will be twenty-three years in August next)-I confess these two motives drew me into this foolish business. I have often since declared to good friends that I was glad it was discovered, because it might have occasioned very ill consequences; and truly I have repented having any hand in it." Challoner was equally fatal against Waller, and said, when at the same giddy altitude as Tomkins, "Gentlemen, this is the happiest day that ever I had. I shall now, gentlemen, declare a little more of the occasion of this, as I am desired by Mr. Peters [the famous Puritan divine, Hugh Peters] to give him and the world satisfaction in it. It came from Mr. Waller, under this notion, that if we could make a moderate party here in London, and stand betwixt and in the gap to unite the king and the Parliament, it would be a very acceptable work, for now the three kingdoms lay a-bleeding; and unless that were done, there was no hopes to unite them," &c. family) was one of those gloomy religionists who looked on surplices, plum-porridge, theatres, dances, Christmas pudding, and homicide as equally detestable, and did his best to shut out all sunshine from that long, rainy, stormy day that is called life. He was at the head of that fanatical, tenderconscienced Parliament of 1653 that Cromwell convened from among the elect in London, after untoward Sir Harry Vane had been expelled from Westminster at the muzzles of Pride's muskets. O Barebone, also, and his crochetty, impracticable fellows, Cromwell had soon enough; and, in despair of all aid but from his own brain and hand, he then took the title of Lord Protector, and became the most inflexible and wisest monarch we have ever had, or indeed ever hope to have. Barebone is first heard of in local history as preaching in 1641, together with Mr. Greene, a felt-maker, at a conventicle in Fetter Lane, a place always renowned for its heterodoxy. The thoughtless Cavaliers, who did not like long sermons, and thought all religion but their own hypocrisy, delighted in gaunt Barebone's appropriate name, and made fun of him in those ribald ballads in which they consigned rednosed Noll, the brewer, to the reddest and hottest portion of the unknown world. At the Restoration, when all Fleet Street was ablaze with bonfires to roast the Rumps, the street boys, always on the strongest side, broke poor Barebone's windows, though he had been constable and commoncouncilman, and was a wealthy leather-seller to boot. But he was not looked upon as of the regicide or extreme dangerous party, and a year afterwards attended a vestry-meeting unmolested. After the Great Fire he came to the Clifford's Inn Appeal Court about his Fleet Street house, which had been burnt over the heads of his tenants, and eventually he rebuilt it. Waller had a very narrow escape, but he extricated himself with the most subtle skill, perhaps secretly aided by his kinsman, Cromwell. He talked of his "carnal eye," of his repentance, of the danger of letting the army try a member of the House. As Lord Clarendon says: "With incredible dissimulation he acted such a remorse of conscience, that his trial was put off, out of Christian compassion, till he could recover his understanding." In the meantime, he bribed the Puritan preachers, and listened with humble deference to their prayers for his repentance. He bent abjectly before the House; and eventually, with a year's imprisonment and a fine of £10,000, obtained leave to retire to France. Having spent all his money in Paris, Waller at last obtained permission from Cromwell to return to England. "There cannot," says Clarendon, "be a greater evidence of the inestimable value of his (Waller's) parts, than that he lived after this in the good esteem and affection of many, the pity of most, and the reproach and scorn of few or none." The body of the unlucky Tomkins was buried in the church-whereunto is added the last tumult in Fleet Strect, yard of St. Andrew's, Holborn. In Irving's "History of Dissenters" there is a curious account, from an old pamphlet entitled "New Preachers," "of Barebone, Greene the felt-maker, Spencer the horse-rubber, Quartermaine the brewer's clerk, and some few others, who are mighty sticklers in this new kind of talking trade, which many ignorant coxcombs call preaching; raised by the disorderly preachment, pratings, and prattlings of Mr. Barebone the leather-seller, and Mr. Greene the felt-maker, on Sunday last, the 19th December." According to Peter Cunningham, that shining light of the Puritan party in the early days of Cromwell, "Praise-God Barebone," was a leather-seller in Fetter Lane, having a house, either at the same The tumult alluded to is thus described: "A time or later, called the "Lock and Key," near brief touch in memory of the fiery zeal of Mr. Crane Court, at which place his son, a great Barebone, a reverend unlearned leather-seller, speculator and builder, afterwards resided. Bare- who with Mr. Greene the felt-maker were both bone (probably Barbon, of a French Huguenot taken preaching or prating in a conventicle amongst a hundred persons, on Sunday, the 19th were not frequent; but when they took place, the of December last, 1641." One of the pleasantest memories of Fetter Lane is that which connects it with the schooldays of that delightful essay-writer, Charles Lamb. He himself, in one of Hone's chatty books, has described the school, and Bird, its master, in his own charming way. Both Lamb and his sister, says Mr. Fitzgerald, in his Memoir of Lamb, went to a school where Starkey had been usher about a year before they correction was performed in a private room adjoining, whence we could only hear the plaints, but saw nothing. This heightened the decorum and solemnity." He then describes the ferule-" that almost obsolete weapon now." "To make him look more formidable-if a pedagogue had need of these heightenings-Bird wore one of those flowered Indian gowns formerly in use with schoolmasters, the strange figures upon which we used to interpret into hieroglyphics of pain and suffering." This ROASTING THE RUMPS IN FLEET STREET (FROM AN OLD PRINT) (see page 95). came to it-a room that looked into "a discoloured, dingy garden, in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings. This was close to Holborn. Queen Street, where Lamb lived when a boy, was in Holborn." Bird is described as an "eminent writer" who taught mathematics, which was no more than "cyphering." "Heaven knows what languages were taught there. I am sure that neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it but a little of our native English. It was, in fact, a humble day-school." Bird and Cook, he says, were the masters. Bird had "that peculiar mild tone-especially when he was inflicting punishment-which is so much more terrible to children than the angriest looks and gestures. Whippings is in Lamb's most delightful vein. So, too, with other incidents of the school, especially "our little leaden ink-stands, not separately subsisting, but sunk into the desks; and the agonising benches on which we were all cramped together, and yet encouraged to attain a free hand, unattainable in this position." Lamb recollected even his first copy-" Art improves nature," and could look back with "pardonable pride to his carrying off the first premium for spelling. Long after, certainly thirty years, the school was still going on, only there was a Latin inscription over the entrance in the lane, unknown in our humbler days." In the evening was a short attendance of girls, to which Miss Lamb went, and she recollected the theatricals, and even Cato being performed by the young gentlemen. "She describes the cast of the characters with relish. 'Martha,' by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to Africa." The Starkey mentioned by Lamb was a poor, crippled dwarf, generally known at Newcastle in his old age as "Captain Starkey," the butt of the street-boys and the pensioner of benevolent citizens. In 1818, when he had been an inmate of the Freemen's Hospital, Newcastle, for twenty-six was lodging in Fetter Lane when he published his "Leviathan." He was not there, however, in 1660, at the Restoration, since we are told that on that glorious occasion he was standing at the door of Salisbury House, the mansion of his kind and generous patron, the Earl of Devonshire; and that the king, formerly Hobbes's pupil in mathematics, nodded to his old tutor. A short sketch of Hobbes himself may not be uninteresting. This sceptical philosopher, hardened into dogmatic selfishness years, the poor old ex-usher of the Fetter Lane school wrote "The Memoirs of his Life," a small pamphlet of only fourteen pages, upon which Hone good-naturedly penned an article which educed Lamb's pleasant postscript. Starkey, it appears, had been usher, not in Lamb's own time, but in that of Mary Lamb's, who came after her brother had left. She describes Starkey running away on one occasion, being brought back by his father, and sitting the remainder of the day with his head buried in his hands, even the most mischievous boys respecting his utter desolation. That clever but mischievous advocate of divine right and absolute power, Hobbes of Malmesbury, by exile, was the son of a Wiltshire clergyman, and he first saw the light in the year of the Armada, his mother being prematurely confined during the first panic of the Spanish invasion. Hobbes, with that same want of self-respect and love of independence which actuated Gay and Thomson, remained his whole life a tolerated pensioner of his former pupil, the Earl of Devonshire; bearing, no doubt, in his time many rebuffs; for pride will be proud, and rich men require wisdom, when in their pay, to remember its place. Hobbes in his time was a friend of, and, it is said, a translator for, Lord Bacon; and Ben Jonson, that ripe scholar, revised his sound translation of "Thucydides." He sat at the feet of Galileo and by the side of Gassendi and Descartes. While in Fetter Lane he associated with Harvey, Selden, and Cowley. He talked and wrangled with the wise men of half Europe. He had sat at Richelieu's table and been loaded with honours by Cosmo de Medici. The laurels Hobbes won in the schools he lost on Parnassus. His translation of Homer is tasteless and contemptible. In mathematics, too, he was dismounted by Wallis and others. Personally he had weaknesses. He was afraid of apparitions, he dreaded assassination, and had a fear that Burnet and the bishops would burn him as a heretic. His philosophy, though useful, as Mr. Mill says, in expanding free thought and exciting inquiry, was based on selfishness. Nothing can be falser and more detestable than the maxims of this sage of the Restoration and of reaction. He holds the natural condition of man to be a state of war-a war of all men against all men; might making right, and the conqueror trampling down all the rest. The civil laws, he declares, are the only standards of good or evil. The sovereign, he asserts, possesses absolute power, and is not bound by any compact with the people, who pay him as their head servant. Nothing he does can be wrong. The sovereign has the right of interpreting Scripture; and he thinks that Christians are bound to obey the laws of an infidel king, even in matters of religion. He sneers at the belief in a future state, and hints at materialism. These monstrous doctrines, which even Charles II. would not fully sanction, were naturally battered and bombarded by Harrington, Dr. Henry More, and others. Hobbes was also vehemently attacked by that disagreeable Dr. Fell, the subject of the well-known epigram, 'I do not like thee, Dr. Fell; Latimer were made of; but it served for the Aristotle of Rochester and Buckingham. A wit of the day proposed as Hobbes's epitaph the simple words, "The philosopher's stone." Hobbes's professed rule of health was to dedicate the morning to his exercise and the afternoon to his studies. At his first rising, therefore, he walked out and climbed any hill within his reach; or, if the weather was not dry, he fatigued himself within doors by some exercise or other, in order to perspire, recommending that practice upon this opinion, that an old man had more moisture than heat, and therefore by such motion heat was to be acquired and moisture expelled. After this he took a comfortable breakfast, then went round the lodgings to wait upon the earl, the countess, the children, and any considerable strangers, paying some short addresses to all of them. He kept these rounds till about twelve o'clock, when he had a little dinner provided for him, which he ate always by himself, without ceremony. Soon after dinner he retired to his study, and had his candle, with ten or twelve pipes of tobacco, laid by him; then, shutting his door, he fell to smoking, thinking, and writing for several hours. At a small coal-shed (not unlike the sheds still to be seen at the south-west end) in Fetter Lane, Dr. Johnson's friend, the poor apothecary, Levett, met a woman of bad character, who duped him into marriage. The whole story, Dr. Johnson used to say, was as marvellous as any page of "The Arabian Nights." Lord Macaulay, in his highlycoloured and somewhat exaggerated way, calls Levett "an old quack doctor, who bled and dosed coal-heavers and hackney-coachmen, and received for fees crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and a little copper." Levett, however, was neither a quack nor a doctor, but an honest man and an apothecary, and the list of his patients is entirely hypothetical. This simple-hearted, benevolent man was persuaded by the proprietress of the coal-shed that she had been defrauded of her birthright by her kinsman, a man of fortune. Levett, then nearly sixty, married her; and four months after, a writ was issued against him for debts contracted by his wife, and he had to lie close to avoid the gaol. Not long afterwards his amiable wife ran away from him, and, being taken up for picking pockets, was tried at the Old Bailey, where she defended herself, and was acquitted. Dr. Johnson then, touched by Levett's misfortunes and goodness, took him to his own home at Bolt Court. who rudely called Hobbes "irritabile illud et vanissimum Malmsburiense animal." The philosopher of Fetter Lane, who was shori-sighted enough to deride the early efforts of the Royal Society, though they were founded on the strict inductive Baconian theory, seems to have been a vain man, loving paradox rather than truth, and desirous of founding, at all risks, a new school of philosophy. The Civil War had warped him; solitary thinking had turned him into a cynical dogmatiser. He was timid as Erasmus; and once confessed that if he was cast into a deep pit, and the devil should put down his hot cloven foot, he would take hold of it to draw himself out. This It was in a house on the east side of this lane, was not the metal that such men as Luther and looking into Fleur-de-Lys Court, that (in 1767) 99 Whitehead. This poor satirist and worthless man May I can worse disgrace on manhood fall?— Elizabeth Brownrigge, midwife to the St. Dunstan's workhouse and wife of a house-painter, cruelly illused her two female apprentices. Mary Jones, one of these unfortunate children, after being often beaten, ran back to the Foundling, from whence she had been taken. On the remaining one, Mary Mitchell, the wrath of the avaricious hag now fell with redoubled severity. The poor creature was perpetually being stripped and beaten, was frequently chained up at night nearly naked, was scratched, and her tongue cut with scissors. It was the constant practice of Mrs. Brownrigge to fasten the girl's hands to a rope slung from a beam in the kitchen, after which this old wretch beat her four or five times in the same day with a broom or a whip. The moanings and groans of the dying child, whose wounds were mortifying from neglect, aroused the pity of a baker opposite, who sent the overseers of the parish to see the child, who was found hid in a buffet cupboard. She was taken to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and soon died. Brownrigge was at once arrested; but Mrs. Brownrigge and her son, disguising themselves in Rag Fair, fled to Wandsworth, and there took lodgings in a chandler's shop, where they were found. The woman was tried at the Old Bailey sessions, and found guilty of murder. Mr. Silas Told, an excellent Methodist preacher, who attended her in the condemned cell, has left a curious, simplehearted account of her behaviour and of what he considered her repentance. She talked a great deal of religion, and stood much on the goodness of her past life. The mob raged terribly as she passed through the streets on her way to Tyburn. The women especially screamed, "Tear off her hat; let us see her face! The devil will fetch her!" and threw stones and mud, pitiless in their hatred. After execution her corpse was thrust into a hackney-coach and driven to Surgeons' Hall for At Pemberton Row, formerly Three-Leg Alley, dissection; the skeleton is still preserved in a Fetter Lane, lived that very indifferent poet but London collection. The cruel hag's husband and admirable miniature-painter of Charles II.'s time, son were sentenced to six months' imprisonment. Flatman. He was a briefless barrister of the A curious old drawing is still extant, representing Inner Temple, and resided with his father till the Mrs. Brownrigge in the condemned cell. She period of his death. Anthony Wood tells us that wears a large, broad-brimmed gipsy hat, tied under having written a scurrilous ballad against marriage, her chin, and a cape; and her long, hard face wears beginning,a horrible smirk of resigned hypocrisy. Canning, in one of his bitter banters on Southey's republican odes, writes, "For this act Did Brownrigge swing. Harsh laws! But time shall come In Castle Street, an offshoot of Fetter Lane, in 1709-10 (Queen Anne), at the house of his father, a master tailor, was born a very small poet, Paul It was this Whitehead, with Carey, the surgeon of the Prince of Wales, who got up a mock procession, in ridicule of the Freemasons' annual cavalcade from Brooke Street to Haberdashers' Hall. The ribald procession consisted of shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps, in carts drawn by asses, followed by a mourning-coach with six horses, each of a different colour. The City authorities very properly refused to let them pass through Temple Bar, but they waited there and saluted the Masons. Hogarth published a print of "The Scald Miserables," which is coarse, and even dull. The Prince of Wales, with more good sense than usual, dismissed Carey for this offensive buffoonery. Whitehead bequeathed his heart to Lord De Spenser, who buried it in his mausoleum with absurd ceremonial. "Like a dog with a bottle tied close to his tail, his comrades serenaded him with the song on his "Not that slow drudge, in swift Pindaric strains, |