After this the history of the property becomes obscure. Mrs. Thrale (later Mrs. Piozzi), the friend of Samuel Johnson, whose residence was near by in Deadman's Place, thought that she saw certain "remains of the Globe" discovered by workmen in the employ of her husband:[428] "For a long time, then,--or I thought it such,--my fate was bound up with the old Globe Theatre, upon the Bankside, Southwark; the alley it had occupied having been purchased and [the tenements] thrown down by Mr. Thrale to make an opening before the windows of our dwelling-house. When it lay desolate in a black heap of rubbish, my mother one day in a joke called it the Ruins of Palmyra; and after that they had laid it down in a grass-plot Palmyra was the name it went by.... But there were really curious remains of the old Globe Playhouse, which though hexagonal in form without, was round within." In spite of serious difficulties in this narrative it is possible that the workmen, in digging the ground preparatory to laying out the garden, uncovered the foundation of the Globe, which, it will be recalled, was formed of piles driven deep into the soil, and so well made that it resisted the fire of 1613.[429] [Footnote 428: Printed in _The Builder_, March 26, 1910, from the Conway MSS. in Mrs. Thrale's handwriting.] [Footnote 429: For later discoveries of supposed Globe relics, all very doubtful, see the London _Times_, October 8, 1909; George Hubbard, _The Site of the Globe Theatre_; and William Martin, _The Site of the Globe_, p. 201.] At the present time the site of the Globe is covered by the extensive brewery of Messrs. Barclay, Perkins, and Company. Upon one of the walls of the brewery, on the south side of Park Street, which was formerly Maiden Lane, has been placed a bronze memorial tablet[430] showing in relief the Bankside, with what is intended to be the Globe Playhouse conspicuously displayed in the foreground. This is a circular building designed after the circular playhouse in the Speed-Hondius _View of London_, and represents, as I have tried to show, not the Globe, but the Rose. At the left side of the tablet is a bust of the poet modeled after the Droeshout portrait. At the right is the simple inscription: HERE STOOD THE GLOBE PLAYHOUSE OF SHAKESPEARE [Footnote 430: The tablet was designed by Dr. William Martin and executed by Professor Lanteri. For photographs of it and of the place in which it is erected, see _The London Illustrated News_, October 9, 1909, CXXXV, 500.] Yet it is very doubtful whether the Globe really stood there. Mr. Wallace has produced good evidence to show that the building was on the north side of Park Street near the river; and in the course of the present study I have found that site generally confirmed. CHAPTER XIII THE FORTUNE