erve the memory of the site.

He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most crowded part
of Regent Street found himself in a solitude, and, was sometimes so
fortunate as to have a shot at a woodcock. [117] On the north the Oxford
road ran between hedges. Three or four hundred yards to the south were
the garden walls of a few great houses which were considered as quite
out of town. On the west was a meadow renowned for a spring from which,
long afterwards, Conduit Street was named. On the east was a field not
to be passed without a shudder by any Londoner of that age. There, as in
a place far from the haunts of men, had been dug, twenty years before,
when the great plague was raging, a pit into which the dead carts had
nightly shot corpses by scores. It was popularly believed that the earth
was deeply tainted with infection, and could not be disturbed without
imminent risk to human life. No foundations were laid there till two
generations had passed without any return of the pestilence, and till
the ghastly spot had long been surrounded by buildings. [118]

We should greatly err if we were to suppose that any of the streets and
squares then bore the same aspect as at present. The great majority of
the houses, indeed have, since that time, been wholly, or in great part,
rebuilt. If the most fashionable parts of the capital could be placed
before us such as they then were, we should be disgusted by their
squalid appearance, and poisoned by their noisome atmosphere.

In Covent Garden a filthy and noisy market was held close to the
dwellings of the great. Fruit women screamed, carters fought, cabbage
stalks and rotten apples accumulated in heaps at the thresholds of the
Countess of Berkshire and of the Bishop of Durham. [119]

The centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields was an open space where the rabble
congregated every evening, within a few yards of Cardigan House and
Winchester House, to hear mountebanks harangue, to see bears dance, and
to set dogs at oxen. Rubbish was shot in every part of the area. Horses
were exercised there. The beggars were as noisy and importunate as in
the worst governed cities of the Continent. A Lincoln's Inn mumper was
a proverb. The whole fraternity knew the arms and liveries of every
charitably disposed grandee in the neighbourhood, and as soon as his
lordship's coach and six appeared, came hopping and crawling in crowds
to persecute him. These disorders lasted, in spite of many accidents,