Haunted London — The North Side of the Strand from Temple Bar to Charing Cross with Digressions to the South Part 1

THE NORTH SIDE OF THE STRAND, FROM TEMPLE BAR TO CHARING CROSS, WITH DIGRESSIONS ON THE SOUTH.

The upper stratum of the Strand soil is composed of a reddish yellow earth, containing coprolites.

Below this runs a seam of leaden-coloured clay, mixed with a few martial pyrites, calcined-looking lumps of iron and sulphur with a bright silvery fracture.

A petition of the inhabitants of the vicinity of the King’s Palace at Westminster (8 Edward II.

) represents the footway from Temple Bar to their neighbourhood as so bad that both rich and poor men received constant damage, especially in the rainy season, the footway being interrupted by _bushes and thickets_.

A tax was accordingly levied for the purpose, and the mayor and sheriffs of London and the bailiff of Westminster were appointed overseers of the repairs.

In the 27th of Edward III.

the Knights Templars were called upon to repair[254] “the bridge of the new Temple,” where the lords who attended Parliament took water on their way from the City.

Workmen constructing a new sewer in the Strand, in 1802, discovered, eastward of St. Clement’s,[255] a small, one-arched stone bridge, supposed to be the one above alluded to, unless it was an arch thrown over some gully when the Strand was a mere bridle-road.

In James I. ’s time, Middleton, the dramatist, describes a lawyer as embracing a young spendthrift, and urging him to riot and excess, telling him to make acquaintance with the Inns of Court gallants, and keep rank with those that spent most; to be lofty and liberal; to lodge in the Strand; in any case, to be remote from the handicraft scent of the City.

[256] It is but right to remind the reader that within the last few years the whole of that part of the north side of the Strand lying between Temple Bar and St. Clement’s Inn, including what was once known as Pickett Street, and extending backward almost as far as Lincoln’s Inn, has been demolished, in order to make room for the new Law Courts, which are now fast rising towards completion.

The house which immediately adjoined Temple Bar on the north side, to the last a bookseller’s, stood on the site of a small pent-house of lath and plaster, occupied for many years by Crockford as a shell-fish shop.

Here this man made a large sum of money, with which he established a gambling club, called by his name, on the west side of St. James’s Street.

It was shut up at Crockford’s death in 1844, and, having passed through sundry phases, is now the Devonshire Club.

Crockford would never alter his shop in his lifetime; but at his death the quaint pent-house and James I. gable[257] were removed, and a yellow brick front erected.

That great engraver, William Faithorne, after being taken prisoner as a Royalist at Basing in the Civil Wars, went to France, where he was patronised by the Abbé de Marolles.

He returned about 1650, and set up a shop--where he sold Italian, Dutch, and English prints, and worked for booksellers--without Temple Bar, at the sign of the Ship, next the Drake and opposite the Palsgrave Head Tavern.

He lived here till after 1680. Grief for his son’s misfortunes induced consumption, of which he died in 1691. Flatman wrote verses to his memory.

_Lady Paston_ is thought his _chef d’œuvre_.

[258] Ship Yard, now swept away, had been granted to Sir Christopher Hatton in 1571. Wilkinson gives a fine sketch of an old gable-ended house in Ship Yard, supposed to have been the residence of Elias Ashmole, the celebrated antiquarian.

Here, probably, he stored his alchemic books and those treasures of the Tradescants which he gave to Oxford.

In 1813 sundry improvements projected by Alderman Pickett led to the removal of one of the greatest eye-sores in London--Butcher Row.

This street of ragged lazar-houses extended in a line from Wych Street to Temple Bar.

They were overhanging, drunken-looking, tottering tenements,[259] receptacles of filth, and invitations to the cholera.

In Dr. Johnson’s time they were mostly eating-houses.

This stack of buildings on the west side of Temple Bar was in the form of an acute-angled triangle; the eastern point, nearest the Bar, was formed latterly by a shoemaker’s and a fishmonger’s shop, with wide fronts; its western point being blunted by the intersection of St. Clement’s vestry-room and almshouse.

On both sides of it resided bakers, dyers, smiths, combmakers, and tinplate-workers.

The decayed street had been a flesh-market since Queen Elizabeth’s time, when it flourished.

A scalemaker’s, a fine-drawer’s, and Betty’s chophouse, were all to be found there.

[260] The whole stack was built of wood, and was probably of about the age of Edward VI.

The ceilings were low, traversed by huge unwrought beams, and dimly lit by small casement windows.

The upper stories overhung the lower, according to the old London plan of widening the footway.

It was at Clifton’s Eating-house, in Butcher Row, in 1763, that that admirable gossip and useful parasite, Boswell, with a tremor of foolish horror, heard Dr. Johnson disputing with a petulant Irishman about the cause of negroes being black.

“Why, sir,” said Johnson, with judicial grandeur, “it has been accounted for in three ways--either by supposing that they were the posterity of Ham, who was cursed; or that God first created two kinds of men, one black and the other white; or that by the heat of the sun the skin is scorched, and so acquires a sooty hue.

This matter has been much canvassed among naturalists, but has never been brought to any certain issue.

”[261] What the Irishman’s arguments were, Boswell of course forgot, but as his antagonist became warm and intemperate, Johnson rose and quietly walked away.

When he had retired, the Irishman said--“He has a most ungainly figure, and an affectation of pomposity unworthy of a man of genius.

” (This very same evening Boswell and his deity first supped together at the Mitre.

) It was here, many years later, that Johnson spent pleasant evenings with his old college friend Edwards,[262] whom he had not seen since the golden days of youth.

Edwards, a good, dull, simple-hearted fellow, talked of their age.

“Don’t let us discourage one another,” said Johnson, with quiet reproof.

It was this same worthy fellow who amused Burke at the club by saying--“You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson.

I have tried in my time to be a philosopher too, but I don’t know how it was, cheerfulness was always breaking in.

” This was a wise blunder, worthy of Goldsmith, the prince of wise blunderers.

It was in staggering home from the Bear and Harrow in Butcher Row, through Clare Market, that Lee, the poet, lay down or fell on a bulk, and was stifled in the snow (1692).

Nat Lee was the son of a Hertfordshire rector; a pupil of Dr. Busby, a coadjutor of Dryden, and an unsuccessful actor.

He drank himself into Bedlam, where, says Oldys, he wrote a play in twenty-five acts.

[263] Two of his maddest lines were-- “I’ve seen an unscrewed spider spin a thought And walk away upon the wings of angels.

” The Duke of Buckingham, who brought Lee up to town,[264] neglected him, and his extreme poverty no doubt drove him faster to Moorfields.

Poor fellow!

he was only thirty-five when he died.

He is described as stout,[265] handsome, and red faced.

The Earl of Pembroke, whose daughter married a son of the brutal Judge Jefferies, was Lee’s chief patron.

The poet, when visiting him at Wilton, drank so hard that the butler is said to have been afraid he would empty the cellar.

Lee’s poetry, though noisy and ranting, is full of true poetic fire,[266] and in tenderness and passion the critics of his time compared him to Ovid and Otway.

Thanks to the alderman, whose name is forgotten, though it well deserved to live,--the streets, lanes, and alleys which once blocked up St. Clement’s Church, like so many beggars crowding round a rich man’s door, were swept away, and the present oval railing erected.

The enlightened Corporation at the same time built the big, dingy gateway of Clement’s Inn--people at the time called it “stupendous;”[267] and to it were added the restored vestry-room and almshouse.

The south side of the Strand was also rebuilt, with loftier and more spacious shops.

In the reign of Edward VI.

this beginning of the Strand had been a mere loosely-built suburban street, the southern houses, then well inhabited, boasting large gardens.

There is a fatality attending some parts of London.

In spite of Alderman Pickett and his stupendous arch of stucco, the new houses on the north side did not take well.

They were found to be too large and expensive;

they became under-let,[268] and began by degrees to relapse into their old Butcher Row squalor; the tide of humanity setting in towards Westminster flowing away from them to the left.

As in some rivers the current, for no obvious reason, sometimes bends away to the one side, leaving on the other a broad bare reach of grey pebble, so the human tide in the Strand has always, in order to avoid the detour of the twin streets (Holywell and Wych), borne away to the left.

It is probable that Palsgrave Place, on the south side, just beyond Child’s bank, in Temple Bar without, marks the site of the Old Palsgrave’s Head Tavern.

The Palsgrave was that German prince who was afterwards King of Bohemia, and who married the daughter of James I. No. 217 Strand, on the south side, was Snow’s, the goldsmith.

Gay has preserved his memory in some pleasant verses.

It was, a few years ago, the bank of those most decent of defrauders, Strachan, Paul, and Bates, and through them proved the grave of many a fortune.

Next to it, westwards, is Messrs. Twinings bank, and their still more ancient tea shop.

The Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand (south side), afterwards the Whittington Club, and now the Temple Club, is described by Strype as a “large and curious house,” with good rooms and other conveniences for entertainments.

[269] Here Dr. Johnson occasionally supped with Boswell, and bartered his wisdom for the flattering Scotchman’s inanity.

In this same tavern the sultan of literature quarrelled with amiable but high-spirited Percy about old Dr. Mounsey; and here, when Sir Joshua Reynolds was gravely and calmly upholding the advantages of wine in stimulating and inspiring conversation, Johnson said, with good-natured irony, “I have heard none of these drunken--nay, drunken is a coarse word--none of these _vinous flights_!

”[270] St. Clement’s is one of Wren’s fifty churches, and it was built by Edward Pierce, under Wren’s superintendence.

[271] It took the place of an old church mentioned by Stow, that had become old and ruinous, and was taken down circa 1682, during the epidemic for church-building after the Great Fire.

This church has many enemies and few friends.

One of its bitterest haters calls it a “disgusting fabric,” obtruded dangerously and inconveniently upon the street.

A second opponent describes the steeple as fantastic, the portico clumsy and heavy, and the whole pile poor and unmeaning.

Even Leigh Hunt abuses it as “incongruous and ungainly.

”[272] There have been great antiquarian discussions as to why the church is called St. Clement’s “Danes.

” Some think there was once a massacre of the Danes in this part of the road to Westminster; others declare that Harold Harefoot was buried in the old church; some assert that the Danes, driven out of London by Alfred, were allowed to settle between Thorney Island (Westminster) and Ludgate, and built a church in the Strand; so, at least, we learn, Recorder Fleetwood told Treasurer Burleigh.

The name of Saint Clement was taken from the patron saint of Pope Clement III.

, the friend of the Templars, who dwelt on the frontier line of the City.

In 1725 there was a great ferment in the parish of St. Clement’s, in consequence of an order from Dr. Gibson, Bishop of London, to remove at once an expensive new altar-piece painted by Kent, a fashionable architectural quack of that day; who, however, with “Capability Brown,” had helped to wean us from the taste for yew trees cut into shapes, Dutch canals, formal avenues, and geometric flower-beds.

Kent was originally a coach-painter in Yorkshire, and was patronised by the Queen, the Duke of Newcastle, and Lord Burlington.

He helped to adorn Stowe, Holkham, and Houghton.

He was at once architect, painter, and landscape gardener.

In the altar-piece, the vile drawing of which even Hogarth found it hard to caricature, the painter was said to have introduced portraits of the Pretender’s wife and children.

The “blue print,” published in 1725, was followed by another representing Kent painting Burlington Gate.

The altar-piece was removed, but the nobility patronised Kent till he died, twenty years or so afterwards.

We owe him, however, some gratitude, if, according to Walpole, he was the father of modern gardening.

The long-limbed picture caricatured by Hogarth was for some years one of the ornaments of the coffee-room of the Crown and Anchor in the Strand.

Thence it was removed to the vestry-room of the church, over the old almshouses in the churchyard.

After 1803 it was transported to the new vestry-room on the north side of the churchyard.

[273] In the old church Sir Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury, was baptized, 1563; as were Sir Charles Sedley, the delightful song-writer and the oracle of the licentious wits of his day, 1638-9; and the Earl of Shaftesbury, the son of that troublous spirit “Little Sincerity,” and himself the author of the _Characteristics_.

The church holds some hallowed earth: in St. Clement’s was buried Sir John Roe, who was a friend of Ben Jonson, and died of the plague in the sturdy poet’s arms.

Dr. Donne’s wife, the daughter of Sir George More, and who died in childbed during her husband’s absence at the court of Henri Quatre, was buried here.

Her tomb, by Nicholas Stone, was destroyed when the church was rebuilt.

Donne, on his return, preached a sermon here on her death, taking the text--“Lo!

I am the man that has seen affliction.

” John Lowin, the great Shaksperean actor, lies here.

He died in 1653. He acted in Ben Jonson’s “Sejanus” in 1605, with Burbage and Shakspere.

Tradition reports him to have been the favourite Falstaff, Hamlet, and Henry VIII.

of his day.

[274] Burbage was the greatest of the Shaksperean tragedians, and Tarleton the drollest of the comedians; but Lowin must have been as versatile as Garrick if he could represent Hamlet’s vacillations, and also convey a sense of Falstaff’s unctuous humour.

Poor mad Nat Lee, who died on a bulk in Clare Market close by, was buried at St. Clement’s, 1692; and here also lies poor beggared Otway, who died in 1685. In the same year as Lee, Mountfort, the actor, whom Captain Hill stabbed in a fit of jealousy in Howard Street adjoining, was interred here.

In 1713 Thomas Rymer, the historiographer of William III.

and the compiler of the _Fœdera_ and fifty-eight manuscript volumes now in the British Museum, was interred here.

He had lived in Arundel Street.

In 1729 James Spiller, the comedian of Hogarth’s time, was buried at St. Clement’s. A

butcher in Clare Market wrote his epitaph, which was never used.

Spiller was the original Mat of the Mint in the “Beggars’ Opera.

” His portrait, by Laguerre, was the sign of a public-house in Clare Market.

[275] In this church was probably buried, at the time of the Plague, Thomas Simon, Cromwell’s celebrated medallist.

His name, however, is not on the register.

[276] Mr. Needham, who was buried at St. Clement’s with far better men, was an attorney’s clerk in Gray’s Inn, who, in 1643, commenced a weekly paper.

He seems to have been a mischievous, unprincipled hireling, always ready to sell his pen to the best bidder.

It is not for us in these later days to praise a church of the Corinthian order, even though its southern portico be crowned by a dome and propped up with Ionic pillars.

Its steeple of the three orders, in spite of its vases and pilasters, does not move me; nor can I, as writers thought it necessary to do thirty years ago,[277] waste a churchwarden’s unreasoning admiration on the wooden cherubim, palm-branches, and shields of the chancel; nor can even the veneered pulpit and cumbrous galleries, or the Tuscan carved wainscot of the altar draw any praise from my reluctant lips.

The arms of the Dukes of Norfolk and the Earls of Arundel and Salisbury, in the south gallery, are worthy of notice, because they show that these noblemen were once inhabitants of the parish.

Among the eminent rectors of St. Clement’s was Dr. George Berkeley, son of the Platonist bishop, the friend of Swift, to whom Pope attributed “every virtue under heaven.

” He died in 1798. It was of his father that Atterbury said, he did not think that so much knowledge and so much humility existed in any but the angels and Berkeley.

[278] Dr. Johnson, the great and good, often attended service at St. Clement’s Church.

They still point out his seat in the north gallery, near the pulpit.

On Good Friday, 1773, Boswell tells us he breakfasted with his tremendous friend (Dr. Levett making tea), and was then taken to church by him.

“Dr. Johnson’s behaviour,” he says, “was solemnly devout.

I never shall forget the tremulous earnestness with which he pronounced the awful petition in the Litany, ‘In the hour of death and in the day of judgment, good Lord, deliver us.

’”[279] Eleven years later the doctor writes to Mrs. Thrale, “after a confinement of 129 days, more than the third part of a year, and no inconsiderable part of human life, I this day returned thanks to God in St. Clement’s Church for my recovery--a recovery, in my 75th year, from a distemper which few in the vigour of youth are known to surmount.

” Clement’s Inn (of Chancery), a vassal of the Inner Temple, derives its name from the neighbouring church, and the “fair fountain called Clement’s Well,”[280] the Holy Well of the neighbouring street pump.

Over the gate is graven in stone an anchor without a stock and a capital C couchant upon it.

[281] This device has reference to the martyrdom of the guardian saint of the inn, who was tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea by order of the emperor Trajan.

Dugdale states that there was an inn here in the reign of Edward II.

There is, indeed, a tradition among antiquaries, that as far back as the Saxon kings there was an inn here for the reception of penitents who came to the Holy Well of St. Clement’s; that a religious house was first established, and finally a church.

The Holy Lamb, an inn at the west end of the lane, was perhaps the old Pilgrims’ Inn.

In the Tudor times the Clare family, who had a mansion in Clare Market, appears to have occupied the site.

From their hands it reverted to the lawyers.

As for the well, a pump now enshrines it, and a low dirty street leads up to it.

This is mentioned in Henry II.

’s time[282] as one of the excellent springs at a small distance from London, whose waters are “sweet, healthful, and clear, and whose runnels murmur over the shining pebbles: they are much frequented,” says the friend of Archbishop Becket, “both by the scholars from the school (Westminster) and the youth from the City, when on a summer’s evening they are disposed to take an airing.

” It was seven centuries ago that the hooded boys used to play round this spring, and at this very moment their descendants are drinking from the ladle or splashing each other with the water, as they fill their great brown pitchers.

The spring still feeds the Roman Bath in the Strand already mentioned.

“For men may come, and men may go, But I flow on for ever.

”[283] The hall of St. Clement’s Inn is situated on the south side of a neat small quadrangle.

It is a small Tuscan building, with a large florid Corinthian door and arched windows, and was built in 1715. In the second irregular area there is a garden, with a statue of a kneeling black figure supporting a sun-dial on the east side.

[284] It was given to the inn by an Earl of Clare, but when is unknown.

It was brought from Italy, and is said to be of bronze, but ingenious persons having determined on making it a blackamoor, it has been painted black.

A stupid, ill-rhymed, cumbrous old epigram sneers at the sable son of woe flying from cannibals and seeking mercy in a lawyers’ inn.

The first would not have eaten him till they had slain him; but lawyers, it is well known, will eat any man alive.

[285] Poor Hollar, the great German engraver, lived in 1661 just outside the back door of St. Clement’s, “as soon as you come off the steps, and out of that house and dore at your left hand, two payre of stairs, into a little passage right before you.

” He was known for “reasons’ sake” to the people of the house only as “the Frenchman limner.

” Such was the direction he sent to that gossiping Wiltshire gentleman, John Aubrey.

The inn has very probably reared up a great many clever men; but it is chiefly renowned for having fostered that inimitable old bragging twaddler and country magistrate, the immortal Justice Shallow.

Those chimes that “in a ghostly way by moonlight still bungle through Handel’s psalm tunes, hoarse with age and long vigils”[286] as they are, must surely be the same that Shallow heard.

How deliciously the old fellow vapours about his wild times!

“Ha, Cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that that this knight and I have seen!

--Ha, Sir John, said I well?

” _Falstaff_--“We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

” _Shal.

_--“That we have, that we have, that we have; in faith, Sir John, we have; our watchword was--Hem, boys!

--Come, let’s to dinner; come, let’s to dinner.

Oh, the days that we have seen!

--Come, come.

”[287] And before that, how he glories in the impossibility of being detected after bragging fifty-five years!

This man, as Falstaff says, “lean as a man cut after supper out of a cheese-paring,” was once mad Shallow, lusty Shallow, as Cousin Silence, his toady, reminds him.

“By the mass,” says again the old country gentleman, “I was called anything, and I would have done anything, indeed, and roundly too.

There was I and little John Doit of Staffordshire, and black George Barnes of Staffordshire, and Francis Pickbone, and Will Squele, a Cotswold man: you had not four such swinge-bucklers in all the inns of court again.

” And thus he goes maundering on with dull vivacity about how he played Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s Show at Mile End, and once remained all night revelling in a windmill in St. George’s Fields.

A curious record of Shakspere’s times serves admirably to illustrate Shallow’s boast.

In Elizabeth’s time the eastern end of the Strand was the scene of frequent disturbances occasioned by the riotous and unruly students of the inns of court, who paraded the streets at night to the danger of peaceable passengers.

One night in 1582, the Recorder himself, with six of the honest inhabitants, stood by St. Clement’s Church to see the lanterns hung out, and to try and meet some of the brawlers, the Shallows of that time.

About seven at night they saw young Mr. Robert Cecil, the Treasurer’s son, pass by the church and salute them civilly, on which they said, “Lo, you may see how a nobleman’s son can use himself, and how he pulleth off his cap to poor men--our Lord bless him!

” Upon which the Recorder wrote to his father, like a true courtier, making capital of everything, and said, “Your lordship hath cause to thank God for so virtuous a child.

” Through the gateway in Pickett Street, a narrow street led to New Court, where stood the Independent Meeting House in which the witty Daniel Burgess once preached.

The celebrated Lord Bolingbroke was his pupil, and the Earl of Orrery his patron.

He died 1712, after being much ridiculed by Swift and Steele for his sermon of _The Golden Snuffers_, and for his pulpit puns in the manner followed by Rowland Hill and Whitfield.

This chapel was gutted during the Sacheverell riots, and repaired by the Government.

Two examples of Burgess’s grotesque style will suffice.

On one occasion, when he had taken his text from Job, and discoursed on the “Robe of Righteousness,” he said-- “If any of you would have a good and cheap suit, you will go to Monmouth Street; if you want a suit for life, you will go to the Court of Chancery;

but if you wish for a suit that will last to eternity, you must go to the Lord Jesus Christ and put on His robe of righteousness.

”[288] On another occasion, in the reign of King William, he assigned as a motive for the descendants of Jacob being called Israelites, that God did not choose that His people should be called _Jacobites_.

Daniel Burgess was succeeded in his chapel by Winter and Bradbury, both celebrated Nonconformists.

The latter of these was also a comic preacher, or rather a “buffoon,” as one of Dr. Doddridge’s correspondents called him.

It was said of his sermons that he seemed to consider the Bible to be written only to prove the right of William III.

to the throne.

He used to deride Dr. Watts’s hymns from the pulpit, and when he gave them out always said-- “Let us sing one of Watts’s whims.

” Bat Pidgeon, the celebrated barber of Addison’s time, lived nearly opposite Norfolk Street.

His house bore the sign of the Three Pigeons.

This was the corner house of St. Clement’s churchyard, and there Bat, in 1740, cut the boyish locks of Pennant[289].

In those days of wigs there were very few hair-cutters in London.

The father of Miss Ray, the singer, and mistress of old Lord Sandwich, is said to have been a well-known staymaker in Holywell Street, now Booksellers’ Row.

His daughter was apprenticed in Clerkenwell, from whence the musical lord took her to load her with a splendid shame.

On the day she went to sing at Covent Garden in “Love in a Village,” Hackman, who had left the army for the church, waited for her carriage at the Cannon Coffee-house in Cockspur Street.

At the door of the theatre, by the side of the Bedford Coffee-house, Hackman rushed out, and as Miss Ray was being handed from her carriage he shot her through the head, and then attempted his own life[290].

Hackman was hanged at Tyburn, and he died declaring that shooting Miss Ray was the result of a sudden burst of frenzy, for he had planned only suicide in her presence.

The Strand Maypole stood on the site of the present church of St. Mary le Strand, or a little northward towards Maypole Alley, behind the Olympic Theatre.

In the thirteenth century a cross had stood on this spot, and there the itinerant justices had sat to administer justice outside the walls.

A Maypole stood here as early as 1634[291].

Tradition says it was set up by John Clarges, the Drury Lane blacksmith, and father of General Monk’s vulgar wife.

The Maypole was Satan’s flag-staff in the eyes of the stern Puritans, who dreaded Christmas pies, cards, and dances.

Down it came when Cromwell went up.

The Strand Maypole was reared again with exulting ceremony the first May day after the Restoration.

The parishioners bought a pole 134 feet high, and the Duke of York, the Lord High Admiral, lent them twelve seamen to help to raise it.

It was brought from Scotland Yard with drums, music, and the shouts of the multitude; flags flying, and three men bare-headed carrying crowns.

[292] The two halves being joined together with iron bands, and the gilt crown and vane and king’s arms placed on the top, it was raised in about four hours by means of tackle and pulleys.

The Strand rang with the people’s shouts, for to them the Maypole was an emblem of the good old times.

Then there was a morris dance, with tabor and pipe, the dancers wearing purple scarfs and “half-shirts.

” The children laughed, and the old people clapped their hands, for there was not a taller Maypole in Europe.

From its summit floated a royal purple streamer; and half way down was a sort of cross-trees or balcony adorned with four crowns and the king’s arms.

It bore also a garland of vari-coloured favours, and beneath three great lanterns in honour of the three admirals and all seamen, to give light in dark nights.

On this spot, a year before, the butchers of Clare Market had rung a peal with their knives as they burnt an emblematical Rump.

[293]