nine or ten years, at my benefit, a note sealed
up, with ten guineas, and these words: 'A
tribute of gratitude from one who was highly
obliged, and saved from ruin, by seeing Mr.
Ross's performance of Barnwell.' " Romantic
as this story sounds, there is no reason for
disbelieving it. A very similar incident occurred,
two or three years ago, to a young man whose
conscience was awakened by seeing Mr. Tom
Taylor's Ticket-of-Leave Man at the Olympic
Theatre, and who thereupon returned a portion
of some money he had embezzled. Hamlet was
right. " The play's the thing" with which to
touch the conscience of a great many people.

I have heard
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul, that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions.

One of the wildest of London legends is that
having reference to "the Field of Forty Footsteps."
The neighbourhood of Bloomsbury is
not externally suggestive of romantic, shadowy,
or grim associations. Its formal streets and
squares, and its heavy brick mansions, are prosaic
in the extreme; yet a strange tradition is
connected with the ground on which now stand
the streets to the east of the northern end of
Tottenham-court-road. In the rear of Montague
House, which occupied the site of the British
Museum—and was, in fact, the edifice in which
the Museum was first established—lay a great
stretch of land, not built over until the
commencement of the present century. The house
and gardens occupied seven acres, and the latter
were laid out in grass-terraces, flower-borders,
lawns, and gravel-walks, and were open to
Paddington westward, to Primrose-hill, Hampstead,
and Highgate, northward, and eastward to
Battle-bridge, Islington, and Pancras. Aubrey
relates that at midnight, on St. John the Baptist's
Day, 1694, he saw twenty-three young women
in the parterre behind Montague House, looking
for a coal under the root of a plantain, to
put under their pillows, that they might dream
of their future husbands. In 1780, the troops
hastily brought up to London to quell the
Gordon riots, were quartered there, the house
having at that time become the depository of
the national scientific and art treasures, and
being, therefore, government property. To the
north of the grounds of Montague House were
certain fields, called the Long Fields, and afterwards
Southampton Fields. Up to 1800, when
the land was covered with houses, these fields
were the resorts of depraved characters, who
fought pitched battles there, especially on Sundays;
and there it was that the famous duel
occurred which gave to one particular field the
name of " the Field of Forty Footsteps."
According to the story, two brothers, in the reign
of James the Second, about the period of the
Duke of Monmoulh's rebellion (1685), fell in
love with the same lady, and, being equally
unwilling to give her up, and the fair one declining
to express a preference for either, determined
to decide the matter by mortal conflict in the
fields at the back of Montague House. The
combat, which was prolonged and ferocious,
and which was rendered still more horrible by
the lady looking on, ended in the death of both
brothers; and the footsteps made by them in
advancing and receding were said to be
ineffaceable. They were forty in number, and it
was alleged that no grass would grow over
them, and that even if the ground was ploughed
up the fatal impressions were sure to reappear.
Southey, who visited the field a little before it
was covered, says that the place where the
brothers are supposed to have fallen dead was
still bare of grass, and that a labourer who
directed him to the spot also pointed out a bank
where the lady who was the cause of the fratricidal
struggle sat to see the combat. It seems
that Southey fully believed in the supernatural
character of the footprints. He had been
recommended by a friend to examine them, as
being " wonderful marks of the Lord's hatred
to duelling." The field in which they were to
be seen, he describes as about three-quarters of
a mile north of Montague House, and five
hundred yards east of Tottenham-court-road. " The
steps,'" says Southey, " are of the size of a large
human foot, about three inches deep, and lie
nearly from north-east to south-west. We
counted only seventy-six; but we were not
exact in counting." Southey appears to have
been unaware that the legend speaks of no more
than forty. This throws great doubt on the
story, and renders it highly probable that the
marks, as suggested by another writer, were
caused, or at least perpetuated, by the throngs
of persons constantly visiting the field. The
legend, however, is a very striking one, and
was made the subject of a romance by Miss
Jane Porter, and also of a melodrama performed
several years ago at the Tottenham-street
Theatre—lately the Queen's, and now the Prince
of Wales's, and a charming and admirably
constructed little theatre.

One of the most famous duellists of the
present century was the profligate and riotous peer,
Lord Camelford. He was not only a duellist,
but a boxer, and a wild fellow upon town,
notorious for his encounters with watchmen,
and for his universal pugnacity towards high and
low. He was a veritable representative of the
Mohocks of a century earlier. In 1799, he
savagely assaulted and wounded a gentleman in
a riot at Drury Lane Theatre. Soon afterwards,
he headed an attack on four "Charleys" in
Cavendish-square, and maintained the struggle
for an hour, when he and his associates were
carried off, guarded by twenty armed watchmen.
At the general peace of 1801, he came into
collision with the mob, because he refused to light
up his apartments in New Bond-street. He had
a regular pugilistic encounter with a naval
lieutenant in the lobby of the Royal Circus
(now the Surrey Theatre), owing to the lieutenant
having knocked off his hat, which he
had neglected to remove when God save the
King was being sung; aud he became so great