In the course of this accident, says the narrator (Mr. Leybourne, in Strype), "I will instance two; the one a dead, the other a living monument. In the digging (strange to relate) they found the mistress of the house of the Rose tavern, sitting in her bar, and one of the drawers standing by the bar's side, with a pot in his hand, only stifled with dust and smoke; their bodies being preserved whole by means of great timbers falling across one another. This is one. Another is this:--The next morning there was found upon the upper leads of Barking church, a young child lying in a cradle, as newly laid in bed, neither the child nor the cradle having the least sign of any fire or other hurt. It was never known whose child it was, so that one of the parish kept it as a memorial; for in the year 1666 I saw the child, grown to be then a proper maiden, and came to the man that kept her at that time, where he was drinking at a tavern with some other company then present. And he told us she was the child so found in the cradle upon the church leads as aforesaid." According to a tablet which hangs beneath the organ gallery of the church, the quantity of gunpowder exploded in this catastrophe was twenty-seven barrels. Tower-street was wholly destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. THE NAG'S HEAD TAVERN, CHEAPSIDE. As you pass through Cheapside, you may observe upon the front of the old house, No. 39, the sign-stone of a "Nag's Head:" this is presumed to have been the sign of the Nag's Head Tavern, which is described as at the Cheapside corner of Friday-street. This house obtained some notoriety from its having been the pretended scene of the consecration of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, at that critical period when the English Protestant or Reformed Church was in its infancy. Pennant thus relates the scandalous story. "It was pretended by the adversaries of our religion, that a certain number of ecclesiastics, in their hurry to take possession of the vacant see, assembled here, where they were to undergo the ceremony from Anthony Kitchen, alias Dunstan, bishop of Landaff, a sort of occasional conformist who had taken the oaths of supremacy to Elizabeth. Bonner, Bishop of London, (then confined in the Tower,) hearing of it, sent his chaplain to Kitchen, threatening him with excommunication, in case he proceeded. The prelate therefore refused to perform the ceremony: on which, say the Roman Catholics, Parker and the other candidates, rather than defer possession of their dioceses, determined to consecrate one another; which, says the story, they did without any sort of scruple, and Scorey began with Parker, who instantly rose Archbishop of Canterbury. The refutation of this tale may be read in Strype's _Life of Archbishop Parker_, at p. 57. A view of the Nag's Head Tavern and its sign, is preserved in La Serre's prints, Entrée de la Reyne Mère du Roy, 1638, and is copied in Wilkinson's _Londina Illustrata_.