received one of those impressions which had so strong an effect on his after life. Crossing the burial-ground one dark evening, towards his home in the school, he saw the glimmering Loftie's lantern of a grave-digger at work. He approached to History of London, look on, with a boyish craving for horrors, and was vol. ii. struck by a skull heedlessly thrown out of the crowded chap. xvi. earth. To the mind of William Cowper such an accident had an extraordinary significance. In after life he remembered it as the occasion of religious emotions not easily suppressed. On the south side of the church, until the recent restorations, there was a stone the inscription of which suggests the less gloomy view of Cowper's character. It marked the burial-place of Mr. John Gilpin; the date was not to be made out, but it must have been fresh when Cowper was at school, and it would be absurd to doubt that the future poet had seen it, and perhaps unconsciously adopted from it the name of his hero.

After leaving Westminster School, Cowper went into solitary lodgings in the Middle Temple; but in 1754 or 1755 he took chambers in the Inner Temple, where for a number of years he devoted much of his time to composition, and not a little of it to thoughts of love, for it was here that he met his first great sorrow in life in the refusal of his family to permit his marriage with his cousin, and it was here that his mental derangement led to his attempt. at suicide. After his removal in 1764 to the Asylum for the Insane, on St. Peter Street, St. Albans, he resolved to return no more to London, and probably never saw the metropolis again. In none of the published Lives of Cowper, nor in the autobiographical fragment printed by Grimshaw, is any hint given as to the exact sites of Cowper's homes in the Temple, or elsewhere in London.

6

He completed the weary Task of his life in 1800.

When Cowper lived in the Temple he was frequently to be found at 'Dick's Coffee House,' No. 8 Fleet Street, near Temple Bar, then called 'Richard's' (see ADDISON, p. 8).

GEORGE CRABBE

1754-1832.

RABBE took lodgings near the Exchange' when he arrived in London, a literary adventurer, in 1780. In 1817 he lodged at No. 37 Bury Street, St. James's, rebuilt and a hotel in 1885. He was a welcome guest at Holland House (see ADDISON, p. 4), at the house of Mr. Murray the publisher, No. 50 A, Albemarle Street, Piccadilly (see BYRON, p. 33), and at the house of Edmund Burke, in Charles Street, St. James's Square (see BURKE, p. 28); but the greater part of his life was spent in the rural parishes of England, and London rarely saw him. He was a frequent guest at 'The Hill,' the house of his friend Lemuel Hoare, at North End, Hampstead Heath. It was, in 1885, a large yellow brick mansion that had been renewed, although its old gate-posts were retained. It faced the east, the last house on the Heath, and at the top of Hendon Road.

In one of his letters he says, 'I rhyme with a great deal of facility at Hampstead.'

In his Diary, July 15, 1817, he records the writing of 'some lines in the solitude of Somerset House, not fifty yards from the Thames on one side, and the Strand on the other, but quiet as the lands of Arabia.'

One of Crabbe's later resorts in London was the Hummums, on the southeast corner of the Market Place, Covent Garden, an old-fashioned hotel, still frequented in 1885 by the sons and grandsons of the men who knew and met Mr. Crabbe there. It boasts of its successive generations of patrons and guests, but is soon to be destroyed.

Table Talk.

Crabbe, after his literary reputation had been established, was staying for a few days at the old Hummums; but he was known to the coffee-room and to the waiters merely as 'Mr. Rogers's Crabbe.' One forenoon, when he had gone out, a gentleman called on him, and while expressing his regret at not finding him, happened to let drop the information that Mr. Crabbe was the celebrated poet. The next time that Crabbe entered the coffee-room he was perfectly astonished at the sensation which he caused; the company were all eagerness to look at him, the waiters all officiousness to serve him.

ALEXANDER CRUDEN.

1701-1770.

CRUDEN

RUDEN settled in London in 1732, and opened a bookstall under the Royal Exchange. Here he prepared and published, in 1737, his 'Concordance,' the financial results of which were so disastrous as to ruin him in business and derange his mind. This Exchange, on the site of the present building, was destroyed by fire in 1838, and no trace of Cruden's shop remains.

Cruden was confined for a time in a private madhouse in Bethnal Green, from which he escaped.

His subsequent London homes were somewhere in the Savoy, in Upper Street, Islington, and later in Camden Passage, Islington Green.

After residing about a year at Aberdeen, he returned to London and resumed his lodgings at Islington [in Cam- John Nelden Passage], where he died on the morning of Novem- son's History of Isber 1, 1770, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. When lington, the person of the house went to inform him that his 1811, p. 39.