Mrs. Centlivre is rather bitterly treated by Leigh Hunt, who says that she, “without doubt, wrote the most entertaining dramas of intrigue, with a genius infinitely greater, and a modesty infinitely less, than that of her sex in general; and she delighted, whenever she could not be obscene, to be improbable.”[419] Milton lodged at one Thomson’s, next door to the Bull-head Tavern at Charing Cross, close to the opening to the Spring Gardens, during the time he was writing his book _Joannis Philippi Angli Defensio_.[420] The Golden Cross ran up beside the King’s Mews a little east of its present site; it was the “Bull and Mouth” of the West End till railways drew travellers from the old roads; it then became a railway parcel office. Poor reckless Dr. Maginn wrote a ballad lamenting the change, in which he mourned the Mews Gate public-house, Tom Bish and his lotteries, and the barrack-yard. He curses Nash and Wyatville, and then bursts forth-- “No more I’ll eat the juicy steak Within its boxes pent, When in the mail my place I take, For Bath or Brighton bent. “No more the coaches I shall see Come trundling from the yard, Nor hear the horn blown cheerily By brandy-sipping guard. King Charles, I think, must sorrow sore, E’en were he made of stone, When left by all his friends of yore (Like Tom Moore’s rose) alone. “No wonder the triumphant Turk O’er Missolonghi treads, Roasts bishops, and in bloody work Snips off some thousand heads! No wonder that the Crescent gains, When we the fact can’t gloss, That we ourselves are at such pains To trample down the Cross! “Oh! London won’t be London long, For ’twill be all pulled down, And I shall sing a funeral song O’er that time-honoured town. One parting curse I here shall make, And then lay down my quill, Hoping Old Nick himself may take Both Nash and Wyatville.”[421] Till late in the last century a lofty straddling sign-post and a long water-trough, just such as still adorn country towns, stood before this inn.[422] Charing Cross Hospital, one of those great charities that atone for so many of the sins of London, relieved, in the year 1878, 15,854 necessitous persons, including more than 1000 cases of severe accident, while above 1500 persons were admitted on the recommendation of governors and subscribers.[423] Surely, if anything can redeem our national vices, our selfishness, our commercial dishonesty, our unjust wars, and our unrighteous conquests, it must be such vast charities as these.