Earl of Eltham, Earl of Chester, Viscount
Launceston, Baron of Renfrew, Baron of Snowdon, Lord of the Isles,
Steward of Scotland, Knight of the most noble Order of the Garter, and
one of his Majesty's most honourable Privy Council, of his mere grace
and princely favour, did the most august City of London the honour to
accept the freedom thereof, and was admitted of the Company of the
Saddlers, in the time of the Right Honourable Sir John Thompson, Knight,
Lord Mayor, and John Bosworth, Esq., Chamberlain of the said City." In
his "Industry and Idleness," Hogarth shows us the prince and princess on
the balcony of Saddler's Hall.

[Illustration: BOW CHURCH, CHEAPSIDE. (_From a view taken about 1750._)]

That dull poet, worthy Sir Richard Blackmore, whom Locke and Addison
praised and Dryden ridiculed, lived either at Saddlers' Hall or just
opposite. It was on this weariful Tupper of his day that Garth wrote
these verses:--

"Unwieldy pedant, let thy awkward muse,
With censures praise, with flatteries abuse.
To lash, and not be felt, in thee's an art;
Thou ne'er mad'st any but thy schoolboys smart.
Then be advis'd, and scribble not agen;
Thou'rt fashioned for a flail, and not a pen.
If B----l's immortal wit thou wouldst descry,
Pretend 'tis he that writ thy poetry.
Thy feeble satire ne'er can do him wrong;
Thy poems and thy patients live not long."

[Illustration: NO. 73, CHEAPSIDE (_see page 341_). (_From an old
View._)]

And some other satirical verses on Sir Richard began:--

"'Twas kindly done of the good-natured cits,
To place before thy door a brace of tits."

Blackmore, who had been brought up as an attorney's clerk and
schoolmaster, wrote most of his verses in his carriage, as he drove to
visit his patients, a feat to which Dryden alludes when he talks of
Blackmore writing to the "rumbling of his carriage-wheels."

At No. 90, Cheapside lived Alderman Boydell, engraver and printseller, a
man who in his time did more for English art than all the English
monarchs from the Conquest downwards. He was apprenticed, when more than
twenty years old, to Mr. Tomson, engraver, and soon felt a desire to
popularise and extend the art. His first funds he derived from the sale
of a book of 152 humble prints, engraved by himself. With the profits he
was enabled to pay the best engravers liberally, to make copies of the
works of our best masters.

"The alderman assured me,"