were disposed in front of the
windows, to the great risk of the passengers." It is to a dilapidated
tavern in the same foul neighbourhood that the gay Templar, it will be
remembered, takes Nigel to be sworn in a brother of Whitefriars by
drunken and knavish Duke Hildebrod, whom he finds surrounded by his
councillors--a bullying Low Country soldier, a broken attorney, and a
hedge parson; and it is here also, at the house of old Miser Trapbois,
the young Scot so narrowly escapes death at the hands of the poor old
wretch's cowardly assassins.

[Illustration: BRIDEWELL, AS REBUILT AFTER THE FIRE, FROM AN OLD PRINT
(_see page 191_).]

The scoundrels and cheats of Whitefriars are admirably etched by
Dryden's rival, Shadwell. That unjustly-treated writer (for he was by no
means a fool) has called one of his comedies, in the Ben Jonson manner,
_The Squire of Alsatia_. It paints the manners of the place at the
latter end of Charles II.'s reign, when the dregs of an age that was
indeed full of dregs were vatted in that disreputable sanctuary east of
the Temple. The "copper captains," the degraded clergymen who married
anybody, without inquiry, for five shillings, the broken lawyers,
skulking bankrupts, sullen homicides, thievish money-lenders, and gaudy
courtesans, Dryden's burly rival has painted with a brush full of
colour, and with a brightness, clearness, and sharpness which are
photographic in their force and truth. In his dedication, which is
inscribed to that great patron of poets, the poetical Earl of Dorset,
Shadwell dwells on the great success of the piece, the plot of which he
had cleverly "adapted" from the _Adelphi_ of Terence. In the prologue,
which was spoken by Mountfort, the actor, whom the infamous Lord Mohun
stabbed in Norfolk Street, the dramatist ridicules his tormenter Dryden,
for his noise and bombast, and with some vigour writes--

"With what prodigious scarcity of wit
Did the new authors starve the hungry pit!
Infected by the French, you must have rhyme,
Which long to please the ladies' ears did chime.
Soon after this came ranting fustian in,
And none but plays upon the fret were seen,
Such daring bombast stuff which fops would praise,
Tore our best actors' lungs, cut short their days.
Some in small time did this distemper kill;
And had the savage authors gone on still,
Fustian had been a new disease i' the bill."

The moral of Shadwell's piece is the da