, singularly enough, the best
edition of his works was printed in Dogwell Court, Whitefriars, by those
eminent printers, Bowyer & Son. At the back of Whitefriars we come upon
Bridewell, the site of a palace of the Norman kings. Cardinal Wolsey
afterwards owned the house, which Henry VIII. reclaimed in his rough and
not very scrupulous manner. It was the old palace to which Henry
summoned all the priors and abbots of England, and where he first
announced his intention of divorcing Katherine of Arragon. After this it
fell into decay. The good Ridley, the martyr, begged it of Edward VI.
for a workhouse and a school. Hogarth painted the female prisoners here
beating hemp under the lash of a cruel turnkey; and Pennant has left a
curious sketch of the herd of girls whom he saw run like hounds to be
fed when a gaoler entered.

If Whitefriars was inhabited by actors, Blackfriars was equally favoured
by players and by painters. The old convent, removed from Holborn, was
often used for Parliaments. Charles V. lodged here when he came over to
win Henry against Francis; and Burbage, the great player of "Richard the
Third," built a theatre in Blackfriars, because the Precinct was out of
the jurisdiction of the City, then ill-disposed to the players.
Shakespeare had a house here, which he left to his favourite daughter,
the deed of conveyance of which sold, in 1841, for L165 15s. He must
have thought of his well-known neighbourhood when he wrote the scenes of
Henry VIII., where Katherine was divorced and Wolsey fell, for both
events were decided in Blackfriars Parliaments. Oliver, the great
miniature painter, and Jansen, a favourite portrait painter of James I.,
lived in Blackfriars, where we shall call upon them; and Vandyke spent
nine happy years here by the river side. The most remarkable event
connected with Blackfriars is the falling in of the floor of a Roman
Catholic private chapel in 1623, by which fifty-nine persons perished,
including the priest, to the exultation of the Puritans, who pronounced
the event a visitation of Heaven on Popish superstition. Pamphlets of
the time, well rummaged by us, describe the scene with curious
exactness, and mention the singular escapes of several persons on the
"Fatal Vespers," as they were afterwards called.

Leaving the racket of Alsatia and its wild doings behind us, we come
next to that great monastery of lawyers, the Temple--like Whitefriars
and Blackfriars, also the site of a bygone