LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS THEATRE IN 1821, from an original sketch by F. W. Fairholt 387 THE BLACK JACK, Portsmouth Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from an original sketch by F. W. Fairholt. This public-house was the resort of the actors from the theatre, and among them Joe Miller, who was buried in the graveyard close by, where the hospital now stands. The house was also frequented by Jack Sheppard, and was sometimes termed “The Jump,” from the circumstance of his having once jumped from one of the first-floor windows to escape from officers of justice 441 HAUNTED LONDON. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. One day when Fuseli and Haydon were walking together, they reached the summit of a hill whence they could catch a glimpse of St. Paul’s. There was the grey dome looming out by fits through rolling drifts of murky smoke. The two little lion-like men stood watching “the sublime canopy that shrouds the city of the world.”[1] Now it spread and seethed like the incense from Moloch’s furnace; now it lifted and thinned into the purer blue, like the waft of some great sacrifice, or settled down to deeper and gloomier grandeur over “the vastness of modern Babylon.” That brown cloud hid a huge ants’ nest teeming with three millions of people. That dome, with its golden coronet and cross, rose like the globe in an emperor’s hand--a type of the civilisation, and power, and Christianity of England. The hearts of the two men beat faster at the great sight. “Be George!” said Fuseli, shaking his white hair and stamping his little foot, “be George! sir, it’s like the smoke of the Israelites making bricks for the Egyptians.” “It is grander, Fuseli,” said Haydon, “for it is the smoke of a people who would _have made the Egyptians make bricks for them_.” It is of the multitudinous streets of this more than Egyptian city, their traditions, and their past and present inhabitants, that I would now write. I shall not pass by many houses where any eminent men dwell or dwelt, without some biographical anecdote, some epigram, some illustration; yet I will not stop long at any door, because so many others await me. I have “set down,” I hope, “nought in malice.” Truth I trust has been, and truth alone shall be, my object. I shall stay at Charing Cross to point out the heroism of the dying regicides; I shall pause at Whitehall to narrate some redeeming traits even in the character of a wilful king. The growth of London, and its conquest of suburb after suburb, has roused the imagination of poets and essayists ever since the days of Queen Elizabeth.