One of the leading characteristics of London citizens of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was their taste for frequenting public gardens and houses of amusement in the suburbs. Many of these were originally health-resorts--‘spas’ or ‘wells,’ they were called, from the springs of mineral water which had formed the chief attraction. In such places the northern suburbs abounded, and the parish of Clerkenwell[83] might be considered their headquarters. At a time when travelling was toilsome and costly, sometimes even dangerous, it was useful to have a little Buxton or Harrogate close at hand. To supply the demand, some enterprising person discovered a spring with rare healing powers; some doctor wrote it up, and the place became, for a time at least, fashionable. Such a spa in St. George’s Fields I have already described. Let me say a few words about others equally interesting, in the neighbourhood in which we now find ourselves. Not far from the site of the Myddleton’s Head, on the north side of the New River, no longer visible, and close to the New River Head, stands Sadler’s Wells Theatre, built on the site of one of these places of health-resort. It seems that some time before 1683, a certain Mr. Sadler, said to have been a surveyor of highways, had put up a wooden building hereabouts, which was known as Sadler’s Music-house. In that year his servants, when digging in the garden for gravel, were reported to have discovered a mineral spring, and in 1684 a pamphlet was published by a doctor named Thomas Guidot, puffing the curative powers of the water. He speaks of five or six hundred patients being there every morning, and assures us that the spring had merely been rediscovered: ‘The priests belonging to the Priory of Clarkenwell, using to attend there, making the people believe that the virtues of the waters proceeded from the efficacy of their prayers.’ ‘These superstitions,’ he adds, ‘were the occasion of its being arched over and concealed at the time of the Reformation.’ In spite of this fine puff, the waters, apparently, soon ceased to attract, though they continued to be sold in Sadler’s name for some time, as shown by an advertisement of June, 1697.[84] In 1699 the building was advertised as Miles’s Musick-house. The place had then become known as a resort for very disorderly characters. Miles was succeeded by Francis Forcer, whose father, a musician, seems to have lived on the spot. The son, said to have been an Oxford man, introduced the diversions of tumbling, and rope-dancing with the pranks of Harlequin and Scaramouch. He died in 1743, and in the following year the establishment was being carried on by one John Warren, when it was presented by a Middlesex Grand Jury as a place of ‘great extravagance, luxury, idleness, and ill-fame.’ Soon afterwards it got into the hands of Mr. Rosoman,[85] who in 1765 pulled down Sadler’s wooden erection, and built a regular theatre on the site.