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His miserable career was summed up by our poet in the following lines written some years after the tune we are treating of, on hearing that he had suddenly dropped dead in Smithfield: "Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed, Who long was a bookseller's hack; He led such a damnable life in this world, I don't think he'll wish to come back."
It is an inheritance of the Continental belief that John Bull sold his womenfolk at Smithfield.
Without the walls, the old Roman vineyards still put forth their green leaves and crude clusters, in the plains of East Smithfield, in the fields of St. Giles's, and on the site where now stands Hatton Garden. Still massere and cheapmen chaffered and bargained, at booth and stall, in Mart-lane, where the Romans had bartered before them.
Driving it up with shouts to the narrow part of the hopo, men secreted there throw their javelins into the affrighted herds, and on the animals rush to the opening presented at the converging hedges, and into the pit, till that is full of a living mass. Some escape by running over the others, as a Smithfield market-dog does over the sheep's backs. It is a frightful scene.
My pleasant friend JEM WHITE was so impressed with a belief of metamorphoses like this frequently taking place, that in some sort to reverse the wrongs of fortune in these poor changelings, he instituted an annual feast of chimney-sweepers, at which it was his pleasure to officiate as host and waiter. It was a solemn supper held in Smithfield, upon the yearly return of the fair of St. Bartholomew.
At last, when the young man was in a sense desperate not in a very noble sense, but desperate for all that she intimated to him that, unless he was prepared to accept her scheme of life, she knew a very respectable young man who was; a young man in Smithfield Market with whom she had walked out, and you could never have told.
This fits into one of the scraps of information afforded by my ancient inhabitant in Ullerton Almshouses, who remembers having heard his grandfather talk of Mat Haygarth's part in some fight or disturbance at the great Smithfield festival. My next extract treats again of Mollie, after an interval of four months.
Towards Smithfield and the narrow lanes and allies about it, are the chief houses of entertainment for such people, where they are promiscuously admitted, men or women, and have places every way fitted for both concealing and entertainment.
Every discreditable incident of their joint careers as units of that vast fighting force, personalities that would have brought blushes to the cheeks of a Smithfield porter, the whole couched in the obscure jargon of Catwater and Landport taverns, rang backwards and forwards across the water, and withal the utmost good humour and enjoyment wreathing their faces with smiles.
Burnet, in a conference I had with the Queen on the subject of peace. she hoped bishops would not be against peace: I said, a good peace was what we prayed daily for, but ... any treaty by which Spain and the West Indies were left to King Philip, must in a little while deliver up all Europe into the hands of France; and, if any such peace should be made, she was betrayed, and we were all ruined; in less than three years' time, she would be murdered, and the fires would be again raised in Smithfield.
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