IT is with places as with persons: they often attract us more in their youth than in their maturer years Apart from the fact that these papers are confessedly confined to the Eighteenth Century, this threadbare truth affords a sufficient excuse for speaking of Leicester Square by its earlier, rather than by its existing name. And, indeed, the abiding interest of the locality lies more in the past than in the present. Not even the addition to the inclosure of busts and a Shakespeare fountain, has been able to regenerate entirely the Leicester Square that most of us remember, with its gloomy back streets,—its fringe of dingy cafÉs and restaurants,—its ambiguous print and curiosity shops,—its incorrigibly unacclimatized Alhambra, whose garish Saracenic splendours scale and peel perpetually in London's imber edax. If we call anything forcibly to mind in connection with the spot, it is a certain central statue, long the mock of the irreverent,—a statue of the first George, which had come of old, gilded and magnificent, from 'Timon's Villa' at Canons, to fall at last upon evil days and evil tongues, to be rudely spotted with sacrilegious paint, to be crowned with a fool's cap, and, finally, to present itself to the spectator in the generally dishonoured and dilapidated condition in which, some twenty years ago, it was exhibited by the late John O'Connor on the walls of the Royal Academy. But when, travelling rapidly backwards, past the Empire and the Alhambra, past Wylde's Globe and the Panopticon, past Burford's Panorama and Miss Linwood's needlework, we enter the last century, we are in the Leicester Fields of Reynolds and Hogarth, of Newton and John Hunter,—the Leicester Fields of Sir George Savile and Frederick, Prince of Wales, of Colbert and Prince Eugene. This is the Leicester Fields of which we propose to speak. Leicester Square and its notorieties may be left to the topographers of the future. *

It is in Ralph Agas his survey of 592 (or rather in Mr. W. H. Overall's excellent facsimile) that we make our first acquaintance with the Fields, then really entitled to their name. According to Agas, the ground to the north-west of Charing Cross, and immediately to the east of the present Whitcomb Street (at that time Hedge Lane) was formerly open pasture land, occupied—in the plan—by a pair of pedestrians larger than life, a woman laying out clothes, and two nondescript quadrupeds, of which one is broken-backed beyond the licence of deformity. The only erections to be discovered are the King's Mews, clustering together for company at the back of the Cross. Sixty years later, judging from the map known generally as Faithorne's, the locality had become more populated.. To the right of St. Martin's Lane it is thickly crowded with buildings; to the left also a line of houses is springing up and creeping northward; while in the open space above referred to stand a couple of lordly mansions. One, on a site which must have lain to the north of the present Little Newport Street, is Newport House, the town residence of Mountjoy Blount, Earl of Newport; the other, which occupies ground now traversed by Leicester Place, is Leicester House. Its garden at the back extended across the eastern end of Lisle Street, and its boundary wall to the north was also the southern boundary wall of the old Military Garden where King James's son, Prince Henry of Wales—whose gallant and martial presentment you shall see figured in the forefront of Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion—had been wont to exercise his troops, and make the now-discredited welkin ring with the shooting-off of chambers, with alarums, and points of war.

Leicester House the first was built about 1632-6 by Robert Sydney, 2nd Earl of Leicester, the father of Algernon Sydney and of that beautiful Dorothy, afterwards Countess of Sunderland, whom Van Dyck painted and Waller 'Petrarchized' as Sacharissa. The site (Swan Close) * was what is known as Lammas-land, and from the Overseers' books of the Parish of St. Martin's in the Fields, the Earl seems not only to have paid 'Lamas' for 'the ground that adjoins to the Military Wall,' but also 'for the field that is before his house'—i.e. Leicester Fields.

This latter probably extended to the present Orange Street, so that the grounds of the old mansion may be roughly said to be bounded by the Mews on the south, and by the Military Garden on the north. Few memories cling about the place which belong to Lord Leicester's lifetime. When not engaged in embassies and the like, he was absent at his other and more famous seat of Penshurst in Kent, and Leicester House was 'To Let.' One of the earliest of its illustrious tenants was that quondam 'Queen of Hearts' (as Howell calls her), the unfortunate Elizabeth of Bohemia, who, already smitten with her last illness, died there in February, 1662, after a few days' residence, 'in the arms' (says Evelyn) 'of her nephew the King' [Charles II.]. Another tenant, some years later, was Charles Colbert, Marquis de Croissy, the French Ambassador, a brother of Louis the Fourteenth's famous minister and financier; and Pepys records, under date of 21st October, 1668, that he was to have taken part in a deputation from the Royal Society to Lord Leicester's distinguished lessee. But having unhappily been 'mighty merry' at a house-warming of his friend Batelier, he arrived too late to accompany the rest, and was fain to console himself (and perhaps to do penance) by carrying his wife to Cow Lane, Smithfield, in order to inspect a proposed new coach, with the splendours of which 'she is out of herself for joy almost,' although, from the sequel, it was not the one ultimately purchased.

Pepys, as will be seen, did not actually enter Leicester House, at all events upon this occasion. His brother diarist was more fortunate. Going in October, 1672, to take leave of the second Lady Sunderland (Sacharissa's daughter-in-law), whose husband had already set out as ambassador to Paris, grave John Evelyn was entertained by her Ladyship with the performances of Richardson the fire-eater, who, in those days, enjoyed a vogue sufficient to justify the record of his prowess in the 'Journal des SÇavans' for 1680. 'He devour'd brimston on glowing coales before us,' says Evelyn, 'chewing and swallowing them; he mealted a beere-glasse and eate it quite up; then taking a live coale on his tongue, he put on it a raw oyster, the coal was blown on with bellows till it flam'd and sparkl'd in his mouth, and so remain'd till the oyster gaped and was quite boiled; then he mealted pitch and wax with sulphur, which he drank downe as it flam'd; I saw it flaming in his mouth a good while; he also tooke up a thick piece of yron, such as laundresses use to put in their smoothing-boxes, when it was fiery hot, held it betweene his teeth, then in his hand, and threw it about like a stone, but this I observ'd he car'd not to hold very long; then he stood on a small pot, and bending his body, tooke a glowing yron with his mouth from betweene his feete, without touching the pot or ground with his hands; with divers other prodigious feates.' *

Lord Leicester closed a long life in 1677, and many other tenants afterwards occupied the mansion in the Fields. Under Anne it was the home of the German Ambassador, or 'Imperial Resident,' who lived in it far into the reign of the first George. At this time, judging from a water-colour bird's-eye view in the Crace Collection at the British Museum, it was a long two-storeyed building, with attics above, a courtyard in front, and a row of small shops or stalls extending on either side of its entrance gate. Behind came the garden, stretching northward, and decorated in the Dutch fashion with formal trees and statues. Hither, on a Saturday in January, 1712, conveyed unostentatiously in a hackney coach from Whitehall Stairs, came Eugene of Savoy, who, by desire of the Emperor Charles VI., had just crossed from the Hague in Her Majesty's 'Yatcht "Fubs"' (Captain Desborough), with the intention of preventing, if possible, what Prior calls that 'vile Utrecht Treaty.' His mission was to be fruitless from the outset, for at the Nore he was greeted with the news of Marlborough's disgrace, and his presence in England had little or no effect upon the pending proposals of peace. But for two months he was to be fÊted and lionized by the nobility in a way which modest warrior and discreet diplomatist as he was—must have taxed his resources as much as a campaign in Flanders. His admirers mobbed him on all occasions. 'I could not see Prince Eugene at court to-day,'—writes Swift to Mrs. Johnson at Dublin,—'the crowd was so great. The Whigs contrive to have a crowd always about him, and employ the rabble to give the word when he sets out from any place.' Elsewhere Swift had said—'I hope and believe he comes too late to do the Whigs any good.' At first His Highness's appearance prepossessed him. He is not ill-looking, 'but well enough, and a good shape.' Later on he has revised his opinion. 'I saw Prince Eugene at court to-day very plain. He is plaguy yellow, and literally ugly besides.' A great Tory lady, Lady Strafford (wife of that haughty envoy to the Hague who declined to serve with Prior in the Utrecht negotiations) goes farther still. She calls him—her Ladyship spells far worse than Stella—a 'frittfull creature,' and adds, 'the Ladys here dont admire Prince Eugene, for he seemes to take very little notis of them,'—a sentiment in which we may perhaps detect a spice of the 'spreto injuria formho'

Much, indeed, depends upon the point of view, political and otherwise. To Steele, with his military instincts and quick enthusiasm, the great Captain, who surprised Cremona and forced the trenches of Turin, comes surrounded with an aura of hyperbole. 'He who beholds him,' he writes in 'Spectator,' No. 340, 'will easily expect from him anything that is to be imagined or executed by the Wit or Force of Man. The Prince is of that Stature which makes a Man most easily become all Parts of Exercise; has Height to be graceful on Occasions of State and Ceremony, and no less adapted for Agility and Dispatch: His Aspect is erect and compos'd; his Eye lively and thoughtful, yet rather vigilant than sparkling: His Action and Address the most easy imaginable, and his Behaviour in an Assembly peculiarly graceful in a certain Art of mixing insensibly with the rest, and becoming one of the Company, instead of receiving the Courtship of it. The Shape of his Person, and Composure of his Limbs, are remarkably exact and beautiful.' Burnet, as staunch a Whig as Steele, writes more moderately, to the same effect. 'I had the honour to be admitted at several times, to much discourse with him; his Character is so universally known, that I will say nothing of him, but from what appeared to myself. He has a most unaffected Modesty, and does scarcely bear the Acknowledgments, that all the World pay him: He descends to an easy Equality with those, with whom he converses; and seems to assume nothing to himself, while he reasons with others: He was treated with great respect by both Parties; but he put a distinguished Respect on the Duke of Marlborough, with whom he passed most of his Time. * The Queen used him civilly, but not with the Distinction, that was due to his high Merit: Nor did he gain much ground with the Ministers.' **

Eugene's stay at Leicester House was brief; but it must have been fully occupied. 'Je caressais beaucoup les gens en place,' he writes in his 'MÉmoires,' and it is clear that, however attentive he may have been to his fallen comrade-in-arms of Blenheim and Oudenarde, he did not omit to pay assiduous court to those in power. 'He has been every day entertain'd at some great man's,' says gossiping Peter Wentworth. Lord Portland gives him 'dinner, musick and a dancing' all at once; the Duke of Shrewsbury has Nicolini to sing for him; the Duke of Buckingham turns out the militia in his honour. And so forth. He, in his turn, was not backward in responding. 'Prince Eugene,' says Lady Strafford, 'has given an order to six ladys and six men. The ladys are the four Marlborough daughters and the Duchess of Bolton and Lady Berkely. 'Tis a medall—Cupid on won side with a sword in won hand and a fann in the othere, and the othere side is Cupid with a bottle in his hand with a sword run through it. And the motto's are in French which I dare not write to you but the English "won don't hinder the othere" ["L'un n'empÊche pas l'autre"].' He had arrived in London on January 5, and he returned to Holland on March 17, carrying with him nothing but the diamond hiked sword ('very rich and genteele, and the diamonds very white,' says Lord Berkeley of Stratton), which, at a cost of £5,000, had been presented to him by Queen Anne. *

After this Leicester House continued to be the home of the German Resident, apparently one Hoffmann, whom Swift calls a 'puppy.' But he had also called his predecessor, Count Gallas, a 'fool,' and too much importance may easily be attached to these flowers of faction. 'Scandal between Whig and Tory goes for nothing,' said Mrs. Manley of the 'New Atalantis'—and Mrs. Manley's knowledge was experimental. About 1718, the house, being again to let, was bought for £6,000 by George Augustus, Prince of Wales, who had quarrelled with his father; and a residence of the Prince of Wales it continued for forty years to come.

This was perhaps the gayest time in its history. From the precision and decorum of St. James's, people flocked eagerly to the drawing-rooms and receptions of Leicester House, where the fiddles were always going. 'Balls, assemblies and masquerades have taken the place of dull formal visiting,' writes my Lord Chesterfield, 'and the women are more agreeable triflers than they were designed. Puns are extremely in vogue, and the license very great. The variation of three or four letters in a word breaks no squares, inasmuch, that an indifferent punster may make a very good figure in the best companies.' He himself was one of the most brilliant luminaries of that brilliant gathering, delighting the Prince and Princess by his mimicry and his caustic raillery. Another was that eccentric Duchess of Buckingham, who passed for the daughter of James II. by Catherine Sed-ley, Countess of Dorchester, and who always sat in a darkened chamber, in the deepest mourning, on the anniversary of King Charles's execution. Thus she was discovered by Lord Hervey, surrounded by servants in sables, in a room hung with black, and lighted only by wax candles. But the most attractive figures of the prince's Court are the youthful maids of honour,—charming, good-humoured Mary Bellenden, Mary Lepel (to whom a later paper of these 'Vignettes' has been devoted), * and reckless and volatile Sophia Howe. Pope and Gay wrote them verses,—these laughing ladies,—and they are often under contemporary pens.

Miss Bellenden married Colonel John Campbell, and became a happy wife; the 'beautiful Molly Lepel' paired off with John, Lord Hervey, whose pen-portrait by Pope exhausts the arts of 'conscientious malevolence,' while poor Sophia Howe fell in love, but did not marry at all, and died in 1726 of a broken heart.

When, in June, 1727, George II. passed from Leicester House to the throne of England, another Prince of Wales succeeded him,—though not immediately,—and maintained the traditions of an opposition Court. This was Frederick, Prince of Wales. Bubb Dodington, afterwards Lord Melcombe, was the Chesterfield of this new rÉgime, and Miss Chudleigh and Lady Middlesex, its Bellenden and Lepel. Political intrigue alternated with gambling and theatricals. One of the habituÉs was the dancing master Desnoyers, whom Hogarth ridiculed; and French comedians made holiday. 'The town,' says a historian of the Square, 'was at this time full of gaiety—masquerades, ridottos, Ranelagh in full swing, and the Prince a prominent figure at all, for he loved all sorts of diversion, from the gipsies at Norwood, the conjurors and fortune-tellers in the bye-streets about Leicester Fields, and the bull-baits at Hockley-in-the-Hole, to Amorevoli at the Opera, and the Faussans in the ballet. When the news came of the Duke of Cumberland having lost the battle of Fontenoy in May, 1745, the Prince was deep in preparation for a performance at Leicester House of Congreve's masque of "The Judgment of Paris," in which he played Paris. He himself wrote a French song for the part, addressed to the three rival goddesses, acted by Lady Catherine Hanmer, Lady Fauconberg, and Lady Middlesex, the dame rÉgnante of the time. It is in the high Regency vein:—

'Venez, mes chÈres DÉesses,

Venez, calmez mon chagrin;

Aidez, mes belles Princesses,

A le noyer dans le vin.

Poussons cette douce ivresse

Jusqu'an milieu de la nuit,

Et n'Écoutons que la tendresse

D'un charmant vis-À-vis."'

'What signifies if Europe has a tyrant more or less, So we but pray Calliope Our verse and song to bless'—-proceeds this Anacreontic performance; and Walpole copies out its entire five stanzas to send to Mann at Florence. They miscarry, he says, 'in nothing but the language, the thoughts and the poetry,'—a judgment which is needlessly severe.

In March, 1751, an end came to these lighthearted junketings, when His Royal Highness quitted the scene almost precipitately from the breaking of an abscess in his side, caused by the blow of a cricket-ball at Cliveden. The Princess and her children continued to live in Leicester Fields until 1766. Meanwhile, to the accompaniment of trumpets and kettledrums, the old house witnessed the proclamation of George III., and the marriage, in its great drawing-room, of the Princess Augusta to Ferdinand, Hereditary Prinee of Brunswick, one of the most popular heroes ever huzzaed to by an English mob. After this last occurrence, the only important event connected with royalty in the Fields is the death at Savile House on 29th December, 1765, of one of the princes. 'The King's youngest brother, Prince Frederick,' writes Walpole (with one of those Gallic affectations of phrase which roused the anger of Macaulay) 'is dead, of a dropsy and consumption: he was a pretty and promising boy.'

The Savile House above referred to stood next to Leicester House on the west. Savile House, too, was not without its memories. It was here that Peter the Great had boozed with his pot companion, the Marquis of Caermarthen, who occupied it when the Czar made his famous visit to this country in 1698. More than one English home bore dirty testimony to the passage of the imperial savage and his suite, the decorous dwelling of John Evelyn in particular, at Sayes Court, Deptford, being made 'right nasty.' There is, however, no special record of any wrong to Savile House beyond the spilling, down the autocratic throat, of an 'intolerable deal of sack' and peppered brandy. In January, 1718, the house was taken by the Prince of Wales, and when, a little later, Leicester House was vacated by Lord Gower, a communication was opened between the two, the smaller being devoted to the royal children. It belonged originally to Aylesbury family, and came through them to the Saviles, one of whom was the Sir George Savile who is by some supposed to have sat for Goldsmith's Mr. Burchell. Sir George was its tenant in the riots of '80, when (as Dickens has not failed to remember in 'Barnaby Rudge') it was besieged by the rioters because he had brought in the Catholic Bill. 'Between Twelve and One O'clock Yesterday morning [June 6th]—says the 'Public Advertiser'—'a large Body [of rioters] assembled before Sir George Savile's House in Leicester Fields, and after breaking all the Windows, destroyed some of the Furniture.' They were finally dispersed by a party of the Horse Grenadier Guards, but not before they had torn up all the iron railings in front of the building, which they afterwards used effectively as weapons of offence. Burke, who had also supported the Bill, was only saved from a like fate by the exertions of sixteen soldiers who garrisoned his house in Charles Street, St. James's Square. With the later use of Savile House, as the home of Hiss Linwood's Art Needlework, which belongs to the present century, this paper has nothing to do.

Moreover, we are straying from Leicester House itself. Deserted of royalty, it passed into the hands of Mr., afterwards Sir Ashton Lever (grand uncle of Charles Lever the novelist), who transferred to it in 1771 the miscellaneous collection he had christened the 'Holophusikon'—a name which did not escape the gibes of the professional jester. His omnium gatherum of natural objects and savage costumes was, nevertheless, a remarkable one, still more remarkable when regarded as the work of a single man. It filled sixteen of the rooms at Leicester House, besides overflowing on the staircases, and included, not only all the curiosities Cook had brought home from his voyages, but also a valuable assortment of bows and arrows of all countries contributed by Mr. Richard Owen Cambridge of Twickenham. *

Its possessor had been persuaded that his treasures which, in their first home at Alkrington near Manchester, had enjoyed great popularity, would be equally successful in London. The result, however, did not justify the expectation (an admittance of 5s. 3d.. per person must have been practically prohibitive), and poor Sir Ashton was ultimately 'obligated,' as Tony Lumpkin would say, to apply to Parliament for power to dispose of his show, as a whole, by lottery. He estimated his outlay at £50,000. Of 30,000 tickets issued at a guinea each, only 8,000 were taken up. The lottery was drawn in March, 1780, and the winner was a Mr. Parkinson, who transferred his prize to the Rotunda at the Southern or Surrey end of Blackfriars Bridge, changing its name to the Museum Leverianum. But it was foredoomed to misfortune, and in 1800 was dispersed under the hammer. A few years after it had crossed the river, Leicester House in turn disappeared, being pulled down in 1790. *

In 1791 Lisle Street was continued across its garden; and a little later still, Leicester Place traversed its site, running parallel to Leicester Street, which had existed long previously, being described in 1720 'as ordinarily built and inhabited, except the west side, towards the Fields, where there is a very good house.'

Leicester Place and Leicester Street,—like Leicester Fields itself,—directly preserve the memory of what Pennant aptly calls the 'pouting-place of Princes.' But there are other traces of Leicester House in the nomenclature of the neighbourhood which had grown up about it. One of the family titles survives in 'Lisle Street'; another in 'Sidney Alley.' Bear Street again recalls the Leicester crest, a bear and ragged staff, while Green Street (one side of which has been recently rebuilt), according to Wheatley and Cunningham, derives its name from the colour of the Leicester Mews, which stood to the south of the Fields. The central inclosure seems to have been first systematically laid out—though it had long been railed round—about 1737. Eleven years later arrived from Canons (Lord Burlington's seat at Edgeware) that famous equestrian statue of George I., which Londoners so well remember. At the time of its erection it was lavishly gilt, and was one of the popular sights of the Town. By some it was attributed to Buchard; by others to Van Nost of Piccadilly, then a fashionable statuary (in lead) like Cheere of Hyde Park Corner. The horse was modelled upon that by Hubert Le Sour which carries King Charles I. at Charing Cross.

Considering its prolonged patronage by royalty, Leicester Fields does not seem to have been particularly favoured by distinguished residents. Charles Dibdin, the song-writer, once lived in Leicester Place, where in 1796 (on the east side) he built a little theatre, the Sans Souci; * and Woollett, of whose velvety engravings Mr. Louis Fagan, not many years ago, prepared an exhaustive catalogue, had also his habitat in Green Street (No. 11), from the leads of which he was wont—so runs the story—to discharge a small cannon when he had successfully put the last touches to a 'Battle of La Hogue,' or a 'Death of General Wolfe.'

Allan Ramsay (in his youth), Barry, and John Opie all once lodged in Orange Court (now Street); and here—at No. 13—was born, of a shoemaker sire and a mother who cried oysters, into a life of many changing fortunes, that strange Thomas Holcroft of the 'Road to Ruin.' In St. Martin's Street, next door to the Congregational Chapel on the east side, lived Sir Isaac Newton from 1710 until January 1725, or two years before his death at Kensington. Few traditions, however, connect the abstracted philosopher (he was nearing seventy when he came to the Fields) with the locality, beyond his visits to Princess Caroline at the great house opposite. *

But there was one member of his household, a few years later, who must certainly have added to the attractions of the ordinary two-storeyed building where he superintended the revision of the second and third editions of the 'Prineipia.' This was his kinswoman,—the 'jolie niece' of Voltaire,—the 'famous witty Miss Barton' of the 'Gentleman's Magazine.' At this date she was 'Superintendant of his domestick Affairs' to Charles, Earl of Halifax, who, dying in 1715, left her £5,000 and a house, 'as a Token'—so runs the bequest—'of the sincere Love, Affection, and Esteem I have long had for her Person, and as a small Recompence for the Pleasure and Happiness I have had in her Conversation.' This, taken in connection with the fact that, since 1706, she had been in receipt of an annuity of £200 a year, purchased in her uncle's name, but for which Halifax was trustee, has led to the conclusion that the relation between the pair was something closer than friendship, and that, following other contemporary precedents, they were privately married. * Be this as it may, Catherine Barton is also interesting as one of the group of gifted women to whom Swift extended the privilege of that half-patronising, half-playful, and wholly unconventional intimacy which is at once the attraction and the enigma of his relations with the other sex.

He met her often in London, though not as often as he wished. 'I love her better than any-one here,' he tells Stella in April, 1711, 'and see her seldomer.' He dines with her 'alone at her lodgings'; he goes with her to other houses; and, Tory though he has become, endures her vivacious Whiggery.

When, at Halifax's death, Catherine Barton, in all probability, returned to her uncle's house, Swift had already gone back to Ireland, and there is no reason for supposing that, although he had lodgings 'in Leicester Fields' in 1711, he ever visited his friend in St. Martin's Street. In August, 1717, Mrs. Barton married John Conduitt, M.P., Xewton's successor as Master of the Mint, and when in town continued to reside with her husband under Newton's roof. And though Halifax was dead, and Swift in exile, and Prior 'in the messenger's hand,' there can be little doubt that during her brief widowhood (?) and second wifehood, those friends who had clustered about the former toast of the Kit Cats must still have continued to visit her. The chairs of Lady Worsley and Lady Betty Germaine must often have waited in the narrow entrance to St. Martin's Street, while the ladies 'disputed Whig and Tory' with Mrs. Conduitt, or were interrupted in their tÊte-À-tÊte by Gay and his Duchess. After Sir Isaac—a long while after—the most notable tenant of the old house was Dr. Charles Burney, author of the 'History of Music,' and of Fanny Burney. Indeed, it was in this very building—with the unassuming little chapel on its right where 'Rainy Day' Smith had often heard Toplady preach—that a mere girl in her teens—no, ungallant Mr. Croker discovered her to have been actually a young woman of five-and-twenty—wrote that 'Evelina' which, in 1778, took the Town by storm. There were panelled rooms and a painted ceiling in the Newton-Burney house of yore, but it could scarcely be here that the little person whom in her graver moments Mrs. Piozzi nicknamed the 'Lady Louisa of Leicester Square' danced round an unmetaphoric mulberry tree with delight at her success in letters, for there are no traces of a garden. At present, in this quiet backwater of street traffic, where Burke and Johnson and Franklin and Reynolds all came formerly to visit their favourite authoress, nothing is discoverable but a dingy tenement with dusty upper windows, with a ground floor that is used as a day school, and a front of stucco'd red brick upon which the blue tablet of the Society of Arts has something of the forlorn effect of an order of merit upon a shoeblack.

Turning out of St. Martin's Street on the north another tablet is discernible in the angle of the Fields to the right upon the comparatively modern red brick faÇade of another school, known as Archbishop Tenison's. Here, at one of the many signs of the 'Golden Head,' lived William Hogarth. * The golden head in his case was rudely carved by himself out of pieces of cork glued together, and represented Van Dyck. To this, says Nichols, succeeded a head in plaster; and this again, when Nichols wrote in 1782, had been replaced by a bust of Newton. About the interior of the house very little seems to be known, but, as it was rated to the poor in 1756 at £60, it must have been fairly roomy. In the later days, when it formed part of the SabloniÈre Hotel, before the hotel made way for the existing school, there were traditions of a studio, probably far less authentic than those of Sir Isaac's ob* There was even another, in Hogarth's day, in the Fields itself. 'At the Golden Head.' on the south side (Hogarth's was on the east), lived Edward Fisher, the mezzotint engraver, to whom we owe so many brilliant plates after Reynolds.

Not many years after Hogarth first took the house, the square was laid out (it had long been railed in), and he is said to have been often seen walking in the inclosure, wrapped in his red roquelaure, with his hat cocked on one side like Frederick the Great. His stables, when he set up the fine coach which Charles Catton decorated for him with the famous Cyprian crest that figures at the bottom of 'The Bathos,' were in Nag's Head Yard, Orange Street. He had—as we know—a country box at Chiswick; but he was at home in Leicester Fields. His friends were about him. Kind old Captain Coram had lodgings somewhere in the neighbourhood; Pine, the 'Friar Pine' of 'Calais Gate,' lived in St. Martin's Lane; beyond that, in Covent Garden and its vicinity, were George Lambert the scene painter, Saunders Welch the magistrate, Richard Wilson, Fielding, and a host of intimates. It was in Leicester Fields that Hogarth died. He had been driven there from Chiswick on the 25th October, 1764, cheerful, but very weak. 'Receiving an agreeable letter from the American Dr. Franklin,' says Nichols, [he] 'drew up a rough draught of an answer to it; but going to bed, he was seized with a vomiting, upon which he rung his bell with such violence that he broke it, and expired about two hours afterwards in the arms of Mrs. Mary Lewis, who was called up on his being taken suddenly ill. He is buried in Chiswick churchyard, where some years subsequently a monument was erected to his memory, with a well-known epitaph by Garrick. After Hogarth's death his widow continued to keep up the 'Golden Head,' and Mary Lewis sold his prints there. Richard Livesay, the engraver, was one of Widow Hogarth's lodgers, and the Scotch painter, Alexander Runciman, was another. If the house had any further notable occupants, they may be forgotten.

Mrs. Hogarth herself died in 1789. Six years before her death she had a next-door neighbour in the Fields, who, in his way, was as illustrious as Hogarth or Reynolds. This was John Hunter, who, in 1783, became the tenant of No. 28, * and at once began extending it backward towards Castle Street (now the Charing Cross Road) to receive his famous museum of Comparative and Pathological Anatomy.

Hogarth had then been dead for nearly twenty years; and it is unlikely that the painter knew much of the young surgeon who was subsequently to become so celebrated; but he was probably acquainted with his brother, William Hunter of Covent Garden, who attended Fielding in 1754. William Hunter had just died when John Hunter came to Leicester Fields. He lived there ten years in the height of his activity and fame, and it was during this period that Reynolds painted that portrait of him in a reverie (now in the Council Room of the College of Surgeons), which was engraved by William Sharp. He survived Sir Joshua but one year.

The house of Reynolds was at the opposite side of the Square, at No. 47, now Puttick and Simpson's auction rooms. He occupied it from 1760 to 1792. We are accustomed to think of Hogarth and Reynolds as contemporaries. But Reynolds was in the pride of his prime when he came to Leicester Fields, while Hogarth was an old and broken man, whose greatest work was done. Apart from this, there could never have been much real sympathy between them. Hogarth, whose own efforts as a portrait-painter were little appreciated in his life time, must have chafed at the carriages which blocked up the doorway of his more fortunate brother; while Reynolds, courtly and amiable as he was, capable of indulgence even to such a caricaturist as Bunbury, could find for his illustrious neighbour, when he came to deliver his famous Fourteenth Discourse, no warmer praise than that of 'successful attention to the ridicule of life.' These things, alas! are the commonplaces of literature and art. It is pleasanter to think of No. 47 filled with those well-known figures of whom we read in Boswell and Madame D'Arblay;—with Burke and Johnson and Goldsmith and Gibbon and Garrick;—with graceful Angelica, and majestic Siddons, and azure-stockinged Montagu;—with pretty Nelly O'Brien and charming Fanny Abington;—with all the crowd of distinguished soldiers, sailors, lawyers and literati who by turns filled the sitter's chair * in the octagonal painting-room, or were ushered out and in by the silver-laced footmen.

Then there were those wonderful disorderly dinners, where the guests were so good and the feast so indifferent; where there were always wit and learning, and seldom enough of knives and forks; where it was an honour to have talked and listened, and no one remembered to have dined. Last comes that pathetic picture of Sir Joshua, when his sight had failed him, wandering sadly in the inclosure with his green shade over his eyes, and peering wistfully and vainly for the lost canary which had been wont to perch upon his finger.

When Reynolds died, Burke wrote his eulogy in the very house where his body lay. The manuscript (which still exists) was blotted with its writer's tears. Those royal periods in which the great orator spoke of his lost friend are too familiar to quote. But after Sir Joshua, the interest seems to fade out of the Fields, and one willingly draws one's pen through the few remaining names that are written in its chronicles.