when “I made her believe I did so, for which I had a half a guinea.” Nor was there much honour among the crew of thieves. “Total three and sixpence, but honest Wigmore kept all the money so farewell him,” is an entry by the keeper of a marriage house, whom a notorious Fleet Parson had dished. Another is by a substitute for the same divine:--“Wigmore being sent for but was drunk, so I was a stopgap.” I confess to a sneaking fondness for those entertaining rascals, but enough of their pranks. Of the other places where irregular marriages were celebrated two demand some notice. One was Keith’s Chapel in Mayfair, “a very bishopric of revenue” to that notorious “marriage broker” the Reverend Alexander Keith. His charge was a guinea, and, being strictly inclusive, covered “the Licence on a Crown Stamp, Minister’s and Clerk’s fees, together with the certificate.” No wonder he did a roaring trade! Keith seemed a nobler quarry than the common Fleet Parson, and the ecclesiastical authorities pursued him in their courts. In October 1742, he was excommunicated: with matchless impudence he retorted by excommunicating his persecutors from the Bishop downwards. Next year they stuck him in the Fleet; but, through Parsons as reckless as himself, he continued to “run” his chapel. In 1749 he made his wife’s death an occasion for advertisement: the public was informed that the corpse, being embalmed, was removed “to an apothecary’s in South Audley Street, where she lies in a room hung with mourning, and is to continue there until Mr. Keith can attend her funeral.” Then follows an account of the chapel. One authority states that six thousand marriages were celebrated there within twelve months; but this seems incredible. That sixty-one couples were united the day before Lord Hardwicke’s Act became law is like enough. Here took place, in 1752, the famous marriage of the fourth Duke of Hamilton to the youngest of the “beautiful Miss Gunnings,” “with a ring of the bed curtain half an hour after twelve at night,” as Horace Walpole tells. And here, in September 1748, at a like uncanny hour, “handsome Tracy was united to the butterman’s daughter in Craven Street.” Lord Hardwicke’s Act was elegantly described as “an unhappy stroke of fortune” by our enterprising divine. At first he threatened another form of competition:--“I’ll buy two or three acres of ground and by God I’ll under-bury them all.” But in the end he had to own himself ruined. He had scarce anything, he moaned, but bread and water, although he had been wont to expend “almost his whole Income (which amounted yearly to several Hundred Pounds per Annum) in relieving not only single distressed Persons, but even whole Families of wretched Objects of Compassion.” The world neither believed nor pitied; and he died in the Fleet on December 17, 1758.