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has stood under them and heard the rumbling of carriages passing the old arches! How imagination, awakened by the sound, is carried back to remote times, and pictures the flight of London's early citizens, their combats and slaughters at this bridge; the ancient navies too, which came up to the old arch and the stored argosy; the procession of armed knights to the combat, and of pious churchmen to St. Paul's; the resigned walk of martyrs to the stake in Smithfield; the midnight murder here committed, and the bound and chained criminals passing to execution; the lagging steps of the plague-stricken, and fearful rush of the Great Fire-frighted denizens! The scene changes, and then masons, sounds of hammers, the busy traffic of barges laden with the supplies of life, are crowding the canal. All is conjured up by busy imagination, and the realised scene only vanishes on our re-ascent to the street's surface, where we find no trace of the memorials which had called back the past to the mind's-eye-the only true magician that exists.”

Early in 1838 was taken down the large Old Swan Inn, Holborn-bridge, the premises covering an acre and a half; and one of Mr. Crosby's views shows the inner yard of the inn, with a distant view of chimneys of houses in West-street. Then we read in the Times of August 22d, 1838: "the rear of the houses on Holborn-bridge has for many years been a receptacle for characters of the most daring and desperate condition. It was here, in a brick tenement now called by the Peachems and Lockits of the day 'Cromwell's House,' that murderous consultations were held, by the result of one of which the assassination of the unfortunate Mr. Steel was accomplished; and here, in a secret ménage (now a slaughter-house for her species), did Turpin suffer

his favourite Bess to repose many a night previously to her disastrous journey to York. It was here that the words Hounslow, Bagshot, and Finchley, resounded in boisterous revelry, while they drank to their comrades on the road.”

Field-lane has been incidentally mentioned. It was well known to the present generation as a depository for stolen pocket-handkerchiefs, in the good old days when smuggled bandanas bore a premium. We remember, in boyhood, shuddering as we passed through these straits of thievery, having been told that young persons were often decoyed into the shops here, and plundered in broad daylight. That such a colony of thieves and receivers should grow up on the foul stream of the Fleet is not to be wondered at in this region of festering humanity. Thirty years ago, Mr. Dickens thus vividly painted the vile place :

"Near to the spot on which Snow-hill and Holborn meet, there opens upon the right hand, as you come out of the City, a narrow and dismal alley leading to Saffron-hill. In its filthy shops are exposed for sale huge bunches of pocket-handkerchiefs of all sizes and patterns -for here reside the traders who purchase them from pickpockets. Hundreds of these handkerchiefs hang dangling from pegs outside the windows, or flaunting from the door-posts; and the shelves within are piled with them. Confined as the limits of Field-lane are, it has its barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried-fish warehouse. It is a commercial colony of itself-the emporium of petty larceny, visited at early morning and setting in of dusk, by silent merchants, who traffic in dark back-parlours, and go as strangely as they come. Here the clothesman, the shoe-vamper, and the rag-merchant, display their goods as sign-boards

to the petty thief; and stores of old iron and bones, and heaps of mildewy fragments of woollen-stuff and linen, rust and rot in the grimy cellars."

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UP THE HEAVY HILL."

This was the cant phrase for Holborn-hill, part of the old road from Newgate and the Tower to the gallows at Tyburn. The criminals were conveyed to execution in a cart, which passed from Newgate up Giltspur-street, and through Smithfield to Cow-lane; Skinner-street had not then been built, and the crooked lane which turned down by St. Sepulchre's Church, as well as Ozier-lane, did not offer sufficient width to admit of the cavalcade passing by either of them with convenience to Holbornhill. The hill has now disappeared; but the phrase is preserved by our old dramatists. Ben Jonson, in his Bartholomew Fair, has:

"Knockem. What! my little bear Ursula! my shebear; art thou alive yet, with thy litter of pigs to grunt out another Bartholomew Fair? ha!

Ursula. Yes; and to amble a-foot, when the fair is done, to hear you from out of a cart up the heavy hill

Knockem. Of Holborn, Ursula? mean'st thou so?"
In Dryden's Limberham, 4to, 1678, we have:

"Aldo. Daughter Pad; you are welcome! What, you have performed the last Christian office to your keeper! I saw you follow him up the heavy hill to Tyburn."

Then Congreve makes Sir Sampson say, in his Love for Love, 4to, 1695:

"Sirrah! you'll be hanged; I shall live to see you go up Holborn-hill."

Gay, in the Beggars' Opera, 4to, 1728, makes Polly thus anticipate Macheath's fate:

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Polly. Now I'm a wretch, indeed! Methinks I see him already in the cart, sweeter and more lovely than the nosegay in his hand!-I hear the crowd extolling his resolution and intrepidity!—what volleys of sighs are sent from the windows of Holborn that so comely a youth should be brought to disgrace!—I see him at the tree."

But more to the purpose is Swift's "Clever Tom Clinch going to be hanged," 1727:

"As clever Tom Clinch, while the rabble was bawling,

Rode stately through Holborn to die in his calling,

He stopped at the George for a bottle of sack,

And promised to pay for it when he came back.

His waistcoat and stockings and breeches were white;
His cap had a new cherry-ribbon to tie't!

The maids to the doors and the balconies ran,

And said, Lack-a-day, he's a proper young man !"

The Holborn line of road, from Aldgate to Tyburn, was also chosen for the cruel whippings which Titus Oates, Dangerfield, and Johnson endured in the reign of James II. "Execution-day" must then have been a carnival of frequent occurrence. Tom Brown, in a sly piece of satire, says that "an old counsellor in Holborn went every execution-day to turn out his clerks with this compliment: 'Go, ye young rogues, go to school and improve."

One of the most memorable rides up the heavy hill was that of the murderer Earl Ferrers, from the Tower to Tyburn, in the first year of the reign of George the Third. Each day of his trial he was conveyed from the Tower to the House of Lords, and back: Walpole

tells us the whole way from Charing-cross to the House of Lords was lined with crowds. Upon the last day a destructive fire broke out, occasioned by a circumstance connected with the trial. On the morning of Friday, April 18th, on the premises of Messrs. Barron and Reynolds, oilmen, in Thames-street, and adjoining St. Magnus Church, a servant was watching the boiling of some inflammatory substances, when the alarm was given that Lord Ferrers was returning from his trial and condemnation. The man left his charge on the fire, and ran out to see the procession; before he could get back the whole place was in flames. By this catastrophe were consumed seven dwelling-houses, all the warehouses of Fresh Wharf, with goods in them, and the roof of the church; the whole destruction being estimated at 40,000l.

But the great ride was on execution-day, from the Tower to Tyburn. Lord Ferrers, according to Walpole, bore the solemnity of a pompous and tedious procession of above two hours with as much tranquillity as if he was only going to his own burial, not to his own execution. Even the awful procession, with its mixture of pageantry, shame, and ignominy, nay, of delay, could not dismount his resolution. He set out from the Tower at nine, amidst crowds, thousands. First went a string of constables; then one of the sheriffs in his chariot and six, the horses dressed with ribbons; next Lord Ferrers in his own landau and six, his coachman crying all the way; guards at each side; the other sheriff's chariot followed empty, with a mourning coach and six, a hearse, and the Horse Guards. Observe, that the empty chariot was that of the other sheriff, who was in the landau with the prisoner, and who was Vaillant, the French bookseller in the Strand. Lord

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