ady Hamilton. The most curious story in
Brasbridge's "Fruits of Experience" is the following, various versions
of which have been paraphrased by modern writers. A surgeon in Gough
Square had purchased for dissection the body of a man who had been
hanged at Tyburn. The servant girl, wishing to look at the corpse, stole
upstairs in the doctor's absence, and, to her horror, found the body
sitting up on the board, wondering where it was. The girl almost threw
herself down the stairs in her fright. The surgeon, on learning of the
resuscitation of his subject, humanely concealed the man in the house
till he could fit him out for America. The fellow proved as clever and
industrious as he was grateful, and having amassed a fortune, he
eventually left it all to his benefactor. The sequel is still more
curious. The surgeon dying some years after, his heirs were advertised
for. A shoemaker at Islington eventually established a claim and
inherited the money. Mean in prosperity, the _ci-devant_ shoemaker then
refused to pay the lawyer's bill, and, moreover, called him a rogue. The
enraged lawyer replied, "I have put you into possession of this property
by my exertions, now I will spend L100 out of my own pocket to take it
away again, for you are not deserving of it." The lawyer accordingly
advertised again for the surgeon's nearest of kin; Mr. Willcocks, a
bookseller in the Strand, then came forward, and deposed that his wife
and her mother, he remembered, used to visit the surgeon in Gough
Square. On inquiry Mrs. Willcocks was proved the next of kin, and the
base shoemaker returned to his last. The lucky Mr. Willcocks was the
good-natured bookseller who lent Johnson and Garrick, when they first
came up to London to seek their fortunes, L5 on their joint note.

[Illustration: ALDERMAN WAITHMAN, FROM AN AUTHENTIC PORTRAIT (_see page
68_).]

Nos. 103 (now the _Sunday Times_ office) and 104 were the shop of that
bustling politician Alderman Waithman; and to his memory was erected the
obelisk on the site of his first shop, formerly the north-west end of
Fleet Market. Waithman, according to Mr. Timbs, had a genius for the
stage, and especially shone as Macbeth. He was uncle to John Reeve, the
comic actor. Cobbett, who hated Waithman, has left a portrait of the
alderman, written in his usual racy English. "Among these persons," he
says, talking of the Princess Caroline agitation, in 1813, "there was a
common councilman named Robert Waith