bbish heap; and close by the brilliant Cavalier
poet, Lovelace, pined and perished, almost in beggary.

The southern side of Fleet Street is somewhat less noticeable. Still, in
Salisbury Square the worthy old printer Richardson, amid the din of a
noisy office, wrote his great and pathetic novels; while in Mitre
Buildings Charles Lamb held those delightful conversations, so full of
quaint and kindly thoughts, which were shared in by Hazlitt and all the
odd people Lamb has immortalised in his "Elia"--bibulous Burney, George
Dyer, Holcroft, Coleridge, Hone, Godwin, and Leigh Hunt.

Whitefriars and Blackfriars are our next places of pilgrimage, and they
open up quite new lines of reading and of thought. Though the Great Fire
swept them bare, no district of London has preserved its old lines so
closely; and, walking in Whitefriars, we can still stare through the
gate that once barred off the brawling Copper Captains of Charles II.'s
Alsatia from the contemptuous Templars of King's Bench Walk. Whitefriars
was at first a Carmelite convent, founded, before Blackfriars, on land
given by Edward I.; the chapter-house was given by Henry VII. to his
physician, Dr. Butts (a man mentioned by Shakespeare), and in the reign
of Edward VI. the church was demolished. Whitefriars then, though still
partially inhabited by great people, soon sank into a sanctuary for
runaway bankrupts, cheats, and gamblers. The hall of the monastery was
turned into a theatre, where many of Dryden's plays first appeared. The
players favoured this quarter, where, in the reign of James I., two
henchmen of Lord Sanquire, a revengeful young Scottish nobleman, shot at
his own door a poor fencing-master, who had accidentally put out their
master's eye several years before in a contest of skill. The two men
were hung opposite the Whitefriars gate in Fleet Street. This
disreputable and lawless nest of river-side alleys was called Alsatia,
from its resemblance to the seat of the war then raging on the frontiers
of France, in the dominions of King James's son-in-law, the Prince
Palatine. Its roystering bullies and shifty money-lenders are admirably
sketched by Shadwell in his _Squire of Alsatia_, an excellent comedy
freely used by Sir Walter Scott in his "Fortunes of Nigel," who has laid
several of his strongest scenes in this once scampish region. That great
scholar Selden lived in Whitefriars with the Countess Dowager of Kent,
whom he was supposed to have married; and