Hear what was written about Westminster so late as the year 1839 (Bardsley on “Westminster Improvements”): “Thorney Island consisted chiefly of narrow, dirty streets lined with wretched dwellings, and of numerous miserable courts and alleys, situate in the environs of the Palace and Abbey, where in the olden time the many lawless characters claiming sanctuary found shelter; and so great had been the force of long custom that the houses continued to be rebuilt, century after century, in a miserable manner for the reception of similar degraded outcasts. The inhabitants of these courts and alleys are stated in the reign of Queen Elizabeth ‘to be the most part of no trade or mystery, to be poor, and many of them wholly given to vice and idleness.’ And in James I.’s time ‘almost every fourth house is an alehouse, harbouring all sorts of lewde and badde people.’ And again: ‘In these narrow streets, and in their close and insalubrious lanes, courts, and alleys, where squalid misery and poverty struggle with filth and wretchedness, where vice reigns unchecked, and in the atmosphere of which the worst diseases are generated and diffused.’” In the little space of a thousand feet by twelve hundred, the courts were sometimes so narrow that the people could shake hands across; the tenements were [Illustration: LOVING CUP PRESENTED TO THE GUARDIANS OF ST. MARGARET’S, WESTMINSTER, BY SAMUEL PIERSON, IN 1764.] sometimes built of boards nailed together; there were no sanitary arrangements at all; there was no drainage; typhus always held possession; and actually under the very shadow of the Cathedral were gathered together the most dangerous and most villainous wretches in the whole country. Old Pye Street, Orchard Street, Duck Lane, the Almonry, and St. Anne’s Street were the homes of the professional street beggar and the professional thief. No respectable person could venture with safety into these streets.