were opened at six o'clock in the evening; the performances commencing at eight, and concluding at ten o'clock.

Mrs. Carter, in one of her letters, speaks of Ranelagh as a place distinguished by all the pomp and splendour of a Roman amphitheatre, but "devoted to no better purpose than a twelvepenny entertainment of cold ham and chicken." On the 1st of June, 1742, she writes:-"In the evening my Lord W―― carried us to Ranelagh. I do not know how I might have liked the place in a more giddy humour, but it did not strike me with any agreeable impression; but, indeed, for the most part these tumultuary torchlight entertainments are very apt to put one in mind of the revel routs of Comus. I was best pleased with walking about the Gardens. It was a delightful evening, and with two or three people I should have thought them quite charming, but these scenes to me lose much of their beauty and propriety in a noisy crowd. 'Soft stillness, and the night, and the touches of sweet harmony,' are naturally adapted to a kind of discourse vastly different from beaux and fine ladies."

On the other hand, when Captain Mirvan, in "Evelina," inveighs against Ranelagh as a dull place "Ranelagh dull! Ranelagh dull!' is represented as echoing from mouth to mouth, while the ladies, as of one accord, regard the Captain with looks of the most unequivocal contempt." "My Lord Chesterfield," writes Walpole, " is so fond of Ranelagh, that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed thither."

During the sixty years that Ranelagh was open to the public, it was the scene of more than one magnificent fête besides its ordinary routine of amusements. For instance, such was the grand Peace Jubilee celebrated here in April, 1749, at which George the Second, accompanied by the Prince and Princess of Wales, and his second son, the Duke

of Cumberland, was present. But, perhaps, the most splendid entertainment which ever took place here, was on the occasion of a famous regatta, in June, 1775. The band, consisting of two hundred and forty musicians, and considered the finest ever heard in England, was led by the celebrated Giardini. The admission-ticket was engraved by Bartolozzi. The latter is now extremely rare and consequently is highly valued by collectors. Soon after the regatta was over Ranelagh was splendidly illuminated, after which there was a concert, and then a magnificent supper and ball. The last entertainment of any note witnessed at Ranelagh was a magnificent ball given by the Knights of the Bath, at the time of their Installation in 1803, soon after which period it opened for the last time to admit the public.

The vast amphitheatre of Ranelagh has long since been razed to the ground, and accordingly those who take an interest in local associations and delight in identifying themselves with the gaiety and gallantry of a former age, will find in a pilgrimage to Ranelagh little to remind them of the past. Ranelagh Gardens stood nearly on the banks of the Thames, on the site of what had formerly been a villa of Lord Ranelagh, but which now forms part of the Gardens apportioned to the venerable pensioners of Chelsea Hospital. A single avenue of trees, formerly illuminated by a thousand lamps, and overcanopying the wit, the rank, and the beauty, of the last century, now forms an almost solitary memento of the departed glories of Ranelagh. Attached to these trees, the author discovered one or two solitary iron fixtures, from which the variegated lamps were formerly suspended.

*Faulkner's "Description of Chelsea," vol. ii., p. 305.

SOUTHWARK.

BOROUGH OF SOUTHWARK. THE MINT.-QUEEN'S BENCH PRISON.-CELEBRATED PERSONS CONFINED THERE.-MARSHALSEA COURT.-BANKSIDE.— CLINK STREET.-PARIS GARDEN.-BEAR GARDEN.-GLOBE THEATRE.THE STEWS.-WINCHESTER HOUSE.-CHURCH OF ST. MARY OVERY.TABARD INN.-BERMONDSEY ABBEY.-BATTLE BRIDGE STAIRS.-ROTHERHITHE.

TH

HE borough of Southwark comprises the parishes of St. George, St. Thomas, St. Saviour, St. John Horsleydown, and St. Olave. Being situated in a different county from London, it continued to be long independent of its jurisdiction; nor was it till the reign of Edward the Sixth that it was formally annexed to the City, and placed under the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor by the title of Bridge Ward Without. The name is said to be derived. from the Saxon word Southverke, or south-work, probably from some fort, or military works, which anciently stood here.

The parish church of St. George the Martyr, Southwark, was erected by John Price between the years 1733 and 1736. It stands on the site of an earlier church, which must have been of great antiquity, inasmuch as so early as the year 1122 we find Thomas of Arderne conferring it upon the monks of the neighbouring Abbey of Bermondsey. In the churchyard, under the east window of the old edifice, was interred the infamous Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, who, after having been incarcerated for nearly ten years in

the neighbouring prison of the Marshalsea, breathed his last within its walls. Such was the abhorrence with which his name was regarded by the populace that, in order to avoid a disturbance within its walls, it was thought necessary to bury him at midnight with the utmost secrecy.

In St. George's Church the celebrated George Monk, Duke of Albemarle, was married to his imperious mistress, Anne Clarges. Among the persons of any eminence who lie buried here are the indefatigable student, John Rushworth, author of the "Historical Collections;" Nahum Tate, the associate of Brady in the metrical version of the Psalms of David; and Edward Cocker, the famous arithmetician, who died in 1677.

Immediately opposite to St. George's Church stood Suffolk Place, the splendid mansion of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, the brother-in-law and magnificent favourite of Henry the Eighth. After his death, in 1545, it became the property of King Henry, who established on its site a royal mint, whence the present Mint Street derives its name. The Mint long continued to be a place of sanctuary for fraudulent and insolvent debtors, who having formed a villainous colony within its precincts, not only set their creditors completely at defiance, but in other respects rendered the place so great a nuisance that in the reign of George the Second an Act of Parliament was passed to annul its anomalous privileges. Gay, in his "Beggar's Opera," has rendered the Mint classical ground as the resort of his light-fingered dramatis personæ ; while Pope has sarcastically immortalized it as an asylum for decayed poets.

"No place is sacred, not the church is free,

Even Sunday shines no Sabbath-day to me :
Then from the Mint walks forth the man of rhyme,
Happy to catch me just at dinner-time."

Epistle to Arbuthnot.

And again in the same inimitable poem

"If want provoked, or madness made them print,
I waged no war with Bedlam or the Mint."

It was in the Mint that the unfortunate poet, Nahum Tate, found refuge from his creditors, and here, on the 12th of August, 1715, in extreme poverty, he breathed his last. The name and site of Suffolk Place are still preserved in Suffolk Street and Suffolk Court.

Near the end of the Borough Road stands the Queen's Bench Prison, a place of great antiquity. Here it was that Henry Prince of Wales, the future victor of Agincourt, was committed by the Lord Chief Justice, Sir William Gascoyne, for insulting, if not striking him, on the Bench.

Among the several men of letters whom debt and distress or misconduct have from time to time conducted to the Queen's Bench Prison, may be mentioned Thomas Dekker, the poet, John Rushworth, the historian, and Christopher Smart, the poet. According to Oldys, Dekker was on one occasion imprisoned here for three years. Rushworth, as is well known, devoted a long life in enriching the literature of his country and in adding to its historical stores, by which means he missed many opportunities of amassing an ample fortune. Neglected by an ungrateful country, the venerable old man, in 1684, was arrested for debt and dragged to the King's Bench, within the rules of which, six years afterwards, he died of a broken heart at the age of eightythree.

The fate of Smart was a scarcely less melancholy one. With the proverbial improvidence of a poet, he was accustomed, it is said, to bring his friends home to dinner when his wife and family had not a meal to eat, and he himself had not a shilling in his pocket. Nevertheless, his inoffen