F15L W55 LONDON: PAST AND PRESENT. Eagle Tavern, CITY ROAD, a tea-garden and place of public entertainment, erected 1838, near to the "Shepherd and Shepherdess," a tea-house and garden noted in the early years of the present century. In the gardens of the Eagle Tavern stands the Grecian Theatre, which since 1882 has been a centre of the Salvation Army. Earl Street, WESTMINSTER. This street, as also Marsham Street and Romney Street, was named after Charles Marsham, Earl of Romney, the owner of the property. Earl's Court, KENSINGTON, a district named after the residence of the Lords of the Manor (the Veres, Earls of Oxford), who held their courts here. Blackmore himself, for any grand effort Would drink and dose at Tooting or Earl's Court, Pope's Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace. In 1764 John Hunter, the famous surgeon, purchased two acres of land in this village from the Earl of Warwick, and built a house on it, where he lived till his death in 1793. The materials of Earl's Court House were sold by auction, February 16 and 17, 1886. One lot was the historical copper (with shaped doors and coving over as fixed) in which the remains of Byrne O'Brien, the Irish giant, were boiled by Hunter. East India Docks, BLACKWALL. Originally constructed chiefly for the ships of the East India Company, but after the opening of the trade to India the East India Dock Company united, 1838, with the West India Dock Company. The first stone of these docks was laid March 4, 1804, and the docks were opened for business August 4, 1806. The import dock has an area of 19 acres, the export dock of 10 acres, and the basin of 3, making a total surface of 32 acres. The export dock has been considerably extended and improved VOL. II B recently, and a new entrance lock constructed. Under the authority of "The London and St. Katharine and East and West India Docks Act 1888," the undertakings of the East and West India Docks Company and the London and St. Katharine Docks Company are now under the management of a joint Committee of Directors of the two companies. The gates are closed at three in the winter months, and at four in the summer months. The mode of admission for visitors is now no stricter than at any of the other docks. These docks are the chief depôts for the noble lines of ships to Australia and New Zealand, and the Brunswick Tavern overlooking the docks -of old famous for Whitebait dinners-has been converted into a home for emigrants to the latter colony. [See Blackwall.] East India House, LEADENHALL STREET,-South side, between Leadenhall Market and Lime Street, was the House of the East India Company, once the largest and most magnificent Company in the world. The house, built originally in 1726, was enlarged by the addition of a central hexastyle Ionic portico and an eastern wing by R. Jupp, in 1799, and subsequently further enlarged and altered from designs by C. R. Cockerell, R.A., and W. Wilkins, R.A. A museum of much interest was added, 1857, by M. Digby Wyatt. The pediment (a poor thing) was the work of the younger Bacon. A statue of Britannia crowned the pediment, and figures of Europe and Asia occupied the sides. was! Passing along Leadenhall Street I saw some ships painted upon the outside of a great wall, which occasioned me to enquire of my schoolfellow what place that He told me 'twas the house belonging to the East India Company, which are a corporation of men with long heads and deep purposes.-Ned Ward's London Spy, pt. i. See the Cornhill Magazine, vol. ii. p. 114, for a print of the old house described by Ned Ward. We beat Rome in eloquence and extravagance; and Spain in avarice and cruelty; and, like both, we shall only serve to terrify schoolboys, and for lessons of morality! Here stood St. Stephen's Chapel; here young Catiline [Fox] spoke; here was Lord Clive's diamond house; this is Leadenhall Street, and this broken column was part of the palace of a Company of Merchants who were sovereigns of Bengal.-H. Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, April 9, 1772. Walpole's prophecy is, in part, more than fulfilled already. St. Stephen's Chapel and the place where Fox spoke-the Houses of Lords and Commons- —are gone, and other houses mark their site, but in Leadenhall Street not even a broken column remains to show where stood the palace of the company who were sovereigns of Bengal. The East India Company was incorporated by a Charter dated December 31, 1600. For two centuries and a half it governed India from its House in Leadenhall Street; and it was not till after the experience of the Indian Mutiny that the sovereignty was, by the Act of September 1, 1858, transferred to the Crown, and the Company virtually dissolved. In July 1861 the East India House was sold and taken down, and an immense pile of offices, with a frontage over 300 feet long and a passage through to Lime Street, erected on the site, 1863-1864, from the designs of Edward N. Clifton. Hoole, the translator of Tasso, was a clerk in the East India House. So, for thirty-three years, was Charles Lamb, the author of Elia. He retired on a pension of £441 a year, and after his death the "Trustees of India House Clerks' Fund" gave his sister Mary Lamb an annuity of £120. "My printed works," said Lamb, "were my recreations-my true works may be found on the shelves in Leadenhall Street, filling some hundred folios." James Mill, the historian of British India (d. 1836), entered the India House as a clerk in 1819, and was afterwards made chief of the Department of Indian Correspondence. His son, John Stuart Mill, became a clerk in the India House in 1823, and rose through the intermediate grades till he was appointed in 1856 to the post formerly held by his father, a position he retained till the Company was dissolved. East Minster, The Cistercian Abbey of St. Mary Graces, New Abbey or East Minster, eastward of East Smithfield, beyond Tower Hill, was founded by Edward III. in 1349, at the time of the first great pestilence. There is a view of the Abbey in the Middlesex Arch. Soc. Trans., vol. i. p. 26. East Smithfield, the name formerly given to the open space east of the Tower, now confined to the street from the Mint to the entrance to the London Docks. In the 13th century, when this was an open area, a fair of fifteen days' duration was held here, commencing on the Eve of Pentecost. Edmund Spenser, author of the Faerie Queen, is said to have been born in East Smithfield. Eastcheap, so called to distinguish it from Westcheap, now Cheapside, was divided into Little Eastcheap in Billingsgate Ward, and Great Eastcheap in Candlewick Ward; Gracechurch Street was the boundary line between them. Eastcheap, west of Gracechurch Street, with the church of St. Michael, Crooked Lane, was swallowed up in the new London Bridge improvements. The name survives in the street between Gracechurch Street and Little Tower Street, formerly Little Eastcheap, and in the church of St. Clement, Eastcheap, in Clement's Lane. Then I hyed me into Est-Chepe, One cryes rybbs of befe, and many a pye; Lydgate's London Lickpenny. This "song" of Lydgate's was turned into more genial prose by old Stow. In Eascheape the cooks cried hot ribs of beef roasted, pies well baked, and other victuals: there was clattering of pewter pots, harp, pipe, and sawtry, yea by cock, nay by cock, for greater oaths were spared,-which seeing it was in Billingsgate ward is noticeable. This Eastcheap is now a flesh-market of butchers, there dwelling on both sides of the street; it had sometime also cooks mixed amongst the butchers and such other as sold victuals ready dressed of all sorts. For of old time when friends did meet and were disposed to be merry, they went not to dine and sup in taverns, but to the cooks, where they called for meat what they liked, which they always found ready dressed, at a reasonable rate.-Stow, p. 81. It took its name Eastcheap from a market anciently there kept for the serving the East part of the city, which market was afterwards removed to Leadenhall Street, and now is kept in Leadenhall.-Strype, B. ii. p. 190. Carlo Buffone. Well, an e'er I meet him in the city, I'll have him jointed, I'll pawn him in Eastcheap among the butchers else.-Ben Jonson, Every Man out of His Humour, Act ii. Sc. 1. The south side of Eastcheap has been swept away by the extension of the Underground Metropolitan Railway, the street greatly widened and vastly improved at the eastern or Little Tower Street end. [See Boar's Head Tavern.] On the south side, No. 5, was Butchers' Hall, rebuilt 1829, (which see), and at the north angle, No. 48 Gracechurch Street, is the National Provident Institution, a good building designed, 1861, by Professor Robert Kerr. Eaton Square, between Grosvenor Place and Belgrave Street. Designed and carried out by the Messrs. Cubitt, commenced in 1827, on what was known as the Five Fields, Chelsea. It was so called from Eaton Hall in Cheshire, the seat of the Marquis of Westminster, the ground landlord. The rent and taxes of the house No. 71, occupied as a temporary official residence by the Speaker of the House of Commons, before the Speaker's house at Westminster was finished, amounted in one year to £964. At No. 92 Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, the hero of Navarino, died April 27, 1851, aged eightyone. Lord Chancellor Truro died, November 11, 1855, at No. 83. Colonel Sibthorp died here in 1856; and Mr. George Peabody, the munificent founder of the Peabody Trust, November 4, 1869. It was at his house, No. 75, that Mr. Ralph Bernal contrived to exhibit to advantage his large and valuable collection of majolica, porcelain, and other works of ornamental art. Here he died in 1853. Jacob Omnium (M. J. Higgins) was also an inhabitant of this square. The eastern end of the square is occupied by the Church of St. Peter (which see). Eaton Street, PIMLICO, was the continuation southwards of Grosvenor Place. It was swept away in the improvements of the Grosvenor Estate in 1868. The line of the east side of Upper Eaton Street is exactly preserved in the east side of Grosvenor Gardens, of Lower Eaton Street in the new extension of Grosvenor Place. Mrs. Abington, the actress, was living at No. 19 in the year 1807. In an unpublished letter addressed to Mrs. Jordan, she speaks of her happiness in her two rooms at No. 19. Pinkerton was living in Lower Eaton Street in 1802.1 In 1807 George Frederick Cooke was living at No. 27 Upper Eaton Street. Thomas Campbell, on his marriage, 1803, at No. 25 Upper Eaton Street. He left for Sydenham in 1 Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 225. |