rallel to Holywell Street and the Strand, into the church-yard of St.
Clements Danes. No good, it was long supposed, could ever come out of
Wych Street. The place had borne an evil name for centuries. Up a
horrible little court branching northward from it good old George
Cruikshank once showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and
prison-breaker, served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter;
and on a beam in the loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his
name. When the pavement of the Strand is under repair, Wych Street
becomes, perforce, the principal channel of communication between the
east and the west end; and Theodore Hook used to say that he never
passed through Wych Street in a hackney-coach without being blocked up
by a hearse and a coal-wagon in the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord
Mayor's carriage in the rear. Wych Street is among the highways we
English are ashamed to show to foreigners. We have threatened to pull it
down bodily, any time these two hundred years, and a portion of the
southern side, on which the old Lyons Inn abutted, has indeed been
razed, preparatory to the erection of a grand metropolitan hotel on the
American system; but the funds appear not to be forthcoming; the scheme
languishes; and, on the other side of the street, another legal
hostelry, New Inn, still flourishes in weedy dampness, immovable in the
strength of vested interests. Many more years must, I am afraid, elapse
before we get rid of Wych Street. It is full of quaint old Tudor houses,
with tall gables, carved porches, and lattice-casements; but the
picturesque appearance of these tenements compensates but ill for their
being mainly dens of vice and depravity, inhabited by the vilest
offscourings of the enormous city. Next to _Napoli senza sole_, Wych
Street, Drury Lane, is, morally and physically, about the shadiest
street I know.

In Wych Street stands, nevertheless, an oasis in the midst of a desert,
a pretty and commodious little theatre, called the Olympic. The
entertainments here provided have earned, for brilliance and elegance,
so well-deserved a repute, that the Olympic Theatre has become one of
the most favorite resorts of the British aristocracy. The Brahminical
classes appear oblivious of the yellow streak of caste, when they come
hither. On four or five nights in every week during the season, Drury
Lane is rendered well-nigh impassable by splendid equipages which have
conveyed dukes and m