116 
London to the west has carried all 
such away from us; and we must there- 
fore be content with the two or three 
_M.P.’s who yet condescend to be do- 
miciliated in. our parish. 
Yet we haye some classical and cu- 
rious. recollections, which it is my 
object in this letter to throw together. 
To say nothing about the ensign of the 
parish, a golden anchor, said to have 
been dug up somewhere near.the spot 
where the present church stands, and 
supposed to have been left by the 
Danes in one of their predatory ex- 
curslons ; for I presume those gentle- 
mien had not such an overplus of the 
precious metal as to make anchors of 
it; and presuming, too, that, if they 
had, they knew the. better properties 
of their own northern iron’ for the pur- 
pose ;—I. shall begin with the house, a 
sketch of. which yowhave given (the 
Duke-of-York): itis now one of thé 
low pot-houses, not at all tavernified ; 
the whole of the upper part of it is let 
out in lodgings. 
is now called, Serle’s-place,) in which 
this house is situated, was, at the time 
of the publication of the Tatler, and 
very long afier, a genteel residence ; 
but. bad become so wretchedly changed 
for the worse, that the ancient name 
was altered for the very purpose of 
trying to restore it to good fame. 
Going westward from this, we come 
presently to Spode and Copeland’s 
china and earthenware depét in Portu- 
gal-street, which is at any time worth 
a morning’s ramble to look over; and 
fT am quite sure that its liberal pro- 
prietors, will feel happy in allowing 
any country lady or gentleman to do 
so, whether they become purchasers 
or not. ,This building is now the 
triumph of imitative art, as it once was 
of histrionic—it was the celebrated 
Lincoln’s Ton-ficlds theatre, where 
the pJays of ‘‘ Rare Ben, andthe immor- 
tal. Shakspeare,”, had employed the 
tuicats of many able periormers, who 
only live now in the page of biographi- 
cal record: here the Richards, the Mac- 
beths, the Othellos,—the kings, queens, 
and conquerors of the earth,—tretted 
and, fumed their hour upon the stage, 
butnow are heard no more, Close by, 
in a burial-ground on the other side 
of the street, repose the bones of the 
once facetious Jo, Miller; and there, 
tog, is his epitaph, by Stephen Duck, 
which I, some time back, sent to the 
Monthly Magazine; and which was 
’ 
Mr, Lacey's Reminiscences of St. Clement Danes: 
Shire-lane, (or, as it 
[Sept. 1, 
from thence copied into nearly all the 
newspapers. 
A little farther on we reach Clare- 
market; certainly, one would think, 
not a very classical neighbourhood, at 
least in the present day. It is princi- 
pally celebrated in the parish for hay- 
ing been once the property of the 
Duke of Newcastle, who, when the 
before-mentioned Act of Parliament 
was passed, took care to have it 
exempt from the operation of it, asa 
great man ought to do; but this is 
found. inconvenient to the parishioners, 
now that it has passed into the hands 
of a man who thinks that “saving 
knowledge is the perfection of know- 
ledge ;” for it was left so dark last 
winter, that a poor fellow broke his 
thigh by falling over a butcher's 
block. But there is one reminiscence 
connected-with this market rather of a 
classical nature, and, at all events, 
worth recording,—which was the fre- 
quenting of a house called the Bull- 
head tavern by persons of the first 
rank, and by the wits and celebrated 
performers of the latter part of the 
seventeenth century. Amongst these 
was that celebrated, facetious, irrita- 
ble, but clever, Doctor Radcliffe: I 
have an old book of memoirs. of him 
lying by me at this moment, “ Printed 
for E. Curll, at the Dial and Bible, 
against St. Dunstan’s Church, in Fleet- 
street, 1717,” from which I gather the 
above fact; though the two instances 
in which the tavern is named, both 
record pieces of ill-fortune communi- 
cated to the doctor while he was so- 
lacing himself there. The first is the 
intelligence of the loss of a vessel in 
the year 1692, returning from the East 
Indies, in which the doctor had a ven- 
ture of 7000/. and Thomas Beitterton, 
the great tragedian, and then English 
Roscius, 20007. and which is desig- 
nated in the book as “a loss that 
broke Mr. Retterton’s back, but did 
not (though very considerable,) much 
affect the doctor; for, when the news 
of this disaster was brought him to_ 
the Bull-head tavern, in Clare-mar- 
ket, where he was drinking with seve- 
ral persons of the first rank, and they 
condoled with him en account of his 
loss, without baulking his glass, he, 
with a smiling countenance, desired 
them to go forward with the healths 
that were then in vogue, saying, That 
he had no more to do, than to go up 
250 pair of stairs, to make himself 
whole 
