ries and Hounsditch, he arrived without accident or molestation, at
Moorfields.

Old Bethlehem, or Bedlam,--every trace of which has been swept away, and
the hospital for lunatics removed to Saint George's Field,--was a vast
and magnificent structure. Erected in Moorfields in 1675, upon the model
of the Tuileries, it is said that Louis the Fourteenth was so incensed
at the insult offered to his palace, that he had a counterpart of St.
James's built for offices of the meanest description. The size and
grandeur of the edifice, indeed, drew down the ridicule of several of
the wits of the age: by one of whom--the facetious Tom Brown--it was
said, "Bedlam is a pleasant place, and abounds with amusements;--the
first of which is the building, so stately a fabric for persons wholly
insensible of the beauty and use of it: the outside being a perfect
mockery of the inside, and admitting of two amusing queries,--Whether
the persons that ordered the building of it, or those that inhabit it,
were the maddest? and, whether the name and thing be not as disagreeable
as harp and harrow." By another--the no less facetious Ned Ward--it was
termed, "A costly college for a crack-brained society, raised in a mad
age, when the chiefs of the city were in a great danger of losing their
senses, and so contrived it the more noble for their own reception; or
they would never have flung away so much money to so foolish a purpose."
The cost of the building exceeded seventeen thousand pounds. However the
taste of the architecture may be questioned, which was the formal French
style of the period, the general effect was imposing. Including the
wings, it presented a frontage of five hundred and forty feet. Each wing
had a small cupola; and, in the centre of the pile rose a larger dome,
surmounted by a gilded ball and vane. The asylum was approached by a
broad gravel walk, leading through a garden edged on either side by a
stone balustrade, and shaded by tufted trees. A wide terrace then led to
large iron gates,' over which were placed the two celebrated figures of
Raving and Melancholy Madness, executed by the elder Cibber, and
commemorated by Pope in the Dunciad, in the well-known lines:--

"Close to those walls where Folly holds her throne,
And laughs to think Monroe would take her down,
Where, o'er the gates, by his famed father's hand,
_Great Cibber's brazen, brainless brothers stand_."

Internally, it was divided by two long gall