HOLBORN, SAINT ANDREW'S CHURCH, GRAY'S INN LANE, &c. COCK LANE GHOST.-HOLBORN.-WILLAM DOBSON.-DEATH OF JOHN BUNYAN. - BOAR INN.-ANECDOTE OF CHARLES THE FIRST AND CROMWELL.-BIRTH OF SAVAGE.-KING STREET.-JOHN BAMPFYLDE. ASSING from Smithfield through Giltspur Street, PASS vagaries of the celebrated Cock Lane Ghost. The person to whom the apparition was said to have presented itself was a girl of twelve years of age, of the name of Parsons, the daughter of the parish clerk of St. Sepulchre, who resided in a wretched hovel, since demolished, about half way down Cock Lane, on the north side. The ghost was said to be that of a young married lady, who had been poisoned by her husband, and who lay buried in the vaults of St. John's Church, Clerkenwell. The extraordinary sensation created by this impudent imposition, as well as the credulity of persons of all ranks of society, almost exceed belief. To George Montagu Horace Walpole writes on the 2nd of February, 1762—“I went to hear the ghost, for it is not an apparition, but an audition. We set out from the Opera, changed our clothes at Northumberland House-the Duke of York, Lady Northumberland, Lady Mary Coke, Lord Hertford, and I, all in one hackney coach-and drove to the spot. It rained torrents, yet the lane was full of mob, and the house so full we could not get in. At last they discovered that it was the Duke of York, and the company squeezed themselves into one another's pockets, to make room for us. The house-which is borrowed, and to which the ghost has adjourned-is wretchedly small and miserable. When we opened the chamber, in which were fifty people, with no light but one tallow candle at the end, we tumbled over the bed of the child to whom the ghost comes, and whom they are murdering by inches in such insufferable heat and stench. At the top of the room are ropes to dry clothes. I asked if we were to have ropedancing between the acts? We had nothing. They told us, as they would at a puppet-show, that it would not come that night till seven in the morning, that is, when there are only 'prentices and old women. We stayed, however, till half an hour after one. The Methodists have promised them contributions; provisions are sent in like forage, and all the taverns and alehouses in the neighbourhood make fortunes." The affair of the ghost story ended in the detection and punishment of the persons concerned in it. According to Boswell, Dr. Johnson took great credit to himself for the share which he had in exposing the imposition.* Till recently the steep descent of Snow Hill led us into Holborn, which derives its name from the Saxon words, old bourne, or old river. The great painter Vandyke was one day passing down Snow Hill, when his attention was attracted by a picture which was exposed for sale in one of the shop-windows. Struck with its merits, he made inquiries respecting the artist, and was informed that he was then employed at his easel in a miserable apartment in the attics. * See Croker's "Boswell, pp. 138, 585. Ed. 1840. Vandyke ascended the stairs; and thus took place his first introduction to William Dobson, then a young man unknown to fame, but whose celebrity as a portrait-painter was afterwards second only in England to that of Vandyke. The great artist not only generously released him from a condition so unworthy his merits, but subsequently introduced him to Charles the First, who, after the death of Vandyke, conferred on him the appointments of his Sergeant-painter and Groom of the Chamber. His prosperity, however, lasted but a short time. The decline of the royal cause, combined with his unfortunate addiction to a life of pleasure, occasioned his falling into difficulties and being thrown into gaol. Hence he was released by the generosity of a Mr. Vaughan of the Exchequer, but died shortly afterwards at the early age of thirty-six. At the sign of the "Star" on Snow Hill, then the residence of his friend Mr. Strudwick, a grocer, died John Bunyan, the illustrious author of the "Pilgrim's Progress." On his return from the country, whither he had been summoned for the pious purpose of effecting a reconciliation between a father and son, he was overtaken by excessive rains, which on his arrival at his lodging on Snow Hill had wetted him to the skin. A fever was the consequence, which put a period to his existence on the 31st of August, 1688, in the sixty-first year of his age. On Snow Hill anciently stood one of the City conduits, a structure ornamented with Corinthian columns and surmounted by the figure of a lamb, a rebus on the name of one Lamb, from whom Lamb's Conduit Street derives its name. Anciently on days of great rejoicing the City conduits were made to run with red and white wine. The last occasion on which the conduit on Snow Hill thus flowed, was on the anniversary of the coronation of George the First, in 1727. VOL. 111. 6 West of Farringdon Street is Shoe Lane, running from Holborn into Fleet Street. In the burial ground of Shoe Lane workhouse was interred the ill-fated poet, Thomas Chatterton. The ground in which he lies buried now forms a part of Farringdon Market, but unfortunately the exact site of his resting place is unknown. Running out of Shoe Lane is Gunpowder Alley, a miserable spot associated with the miseries of a poet scarcely less gifted or unfortunate, Richard Lovelace. According to Anthony Wood, he was "accounted the most beautiful and amiable person that ever eye beheld; a person, also, of minute modesty, virtue, and courtly deportment, which made him, especially when he retired to the great city, much admired and adored by the female sex." Having exhausted his fortune in the cause of Charles the First, and twice suffered imprisonment as the penalty of his loyalty, he retired to the Continent, where, having raised a regiment for the French King, he was so severely wounded at Dunkirk, that in England it was long believed that he was dead. Anthony Wood draws a painful picture of Lovelace's condition at the close of life. "Having consumed all his estate, he grew very melancholy, which at length brought him into a consumption; became very poor in body and purse; was the object of charity; went in ragged clothes-whereas, when he was in his glory, he wore cloth of gold and silver; and mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places more befitting the worst of beggars than poorest of servants." Lovelace died in a very mean lodging in Gunpowder Alley in 1658, and was buried at the west end of St. Bride's Church. Another remarkable person who lived in Gunpowder Alley was William Lilly, the astrologer, who here served his apprenticeship in the occult sciences under one Evans, a clergyman of indifferent repute. Fetter Lane, running from Holborn Hill into Fleet Street, parallel with Shoe Lane, has been supposed to derive its name from the fetters of criminals. Such, however, is not the case. In the reign of Charles the First it was called Fewtor's Lane, a name which Stow derives from its having been the resort of Fewtors, as idle and disorderly persons were then styled,-a corruption from "defaytors" or defaulters. Fetter Lane is rendered especially interesting from its having been for some time the residence of the immortal Dryden. No. 16, though apparently on insufficient evidence, is said to have been the house which he occupied. In this street Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury was residing at the period when he published his celebrated "Leviathan." In Three Leg Alley, too, in the immediate neighbourhood, Thomas Flatman, the poet, breathed his last. The name has since been dignified into Pemberton Row. In Fetter Lane Dr. Robert Levet, the grave and wellknown friend of Dr. Johnson, was inveigled into that extraordinary marriage with a woman of the town, which Dr. Johnson used to say presented as marvellous features as anything to be found in the "Arabian Nights." Levet, it appears, when nearly sixty years of age, had made the acquaintance of the female in question; and though her habitation was merely a small coal-shed in Fetter Lane, she had art enough to persuade him that she was nearly related to a man of fortune, who had defrauded her of her birthright. Levet, completely duped, made her his wife. They had scarcely, however, been married four months when a writ was issued against him for debts contracted by his wife, and for some time he was compelled to keep himself in close concealment in order to avoid the horrors of a gaol. Not long afterwards his wife ran away from him, and having been |