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From James I to the Great Fire
Previous page: Early Fleet Street
Fleet street, even in James I.'s time, had taken on a quasi commercial, quasi popular aspect which has to some extent adhered to it ever since. On that portion of it where the White Friars had once been, the area known as Alsatia in due course became a sanctuary for those who were glad often with good reason to avail themselves of its immunity from legal interference.
The memory of the Knights Templars had then long been obliterated from the "bricky towers," as Spenser calls them, by the coming of the lawyers in the fourteenth century and their permanent settlement. But the older associations of the place are still kept alive by the presence of the Temple Church, wherein the cross legged effigies of the Knights lie amid a much altered environment.
The Great Fire licked up in its course most of Fleet street, but stopped near Inner Temple Gate on one side and at Fetter lane on the other. One of the churches, St. Bride's, fell a victim to the flames, but the fact that Wren rebuilt it and crowned it with one of the most exquisite of his steeples made the disaster a blessing in disguise.
The other church, St. Dunstan's, has for different reasons been rebuilt, and now, instead of its projection into the highway with its overhanging clock, beloved of Charles Lamb, and coveted as a child by Lord Hertford and acquired by him as a man for his villa in the Regent's Park, we have Shaw's beautiful tower, set up in 1832, one of the few excellent architectural features emanating from a period not prolific in such things.
Next page: Samuel Johnson
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