THE OLD LAW QUARTER.

Fifteen years since the writer of this page used to dine with a conveyancer—a lawyer of an old and almost obsolete school—who had a numerous household, and kept a hospitable table in Lincoln's Inn Fields; but the conveyancer was almost the last of his species. The householding legal resident of the Fields, like the domestic resident of the Temple, has become a feature of the past. Among the ordinary nocturnal population of the square called Lincoln's Inn Fields, may be found a few solicitors who sleep by night where they work by day, and a sprinkling of young barristers and law students who have residential chambers in grand houses that less than a century since were tenanted by members of a proud and splendid aristocracy; but the gentle families have by this time altogether disappeared from the mansions.

But long before this aristocratic secession, the lawyers took possession of a new quarter. The great charm of Lincoln's Inn Fields had been the freshness of the air which played over the open space. So also the recommendation of Great Queen Street had been the purity of its rural atmosphere. Built between 1630 and 1730, that thoroughfare—at present hemmed in by fetid courts and narrow passages—caught the keen breezes of Hampstead, and long maintained a character for salubrity as well as fashion. Of those fine squares and imposing streets which lie between High Holborn and Hampstead, not a stone had been laid when the ground covered by the present Freemason's Tavern was one of the most desirable sites of the metropolis. Indeed, the houses between Holborn and Great Queen Street were not erected till the mansions on the south side of the latter thoroughfare—built long before the northern side—had for years commanded an unbroken view of Holborn Fields. Notwithstanding many gloomy predictions of the evils that would necessarily follow from over-building, London steadily increased, and enterprising architects deprived Lincoln's Inn Fields and Great Queen Street of their rural qualities. Crossing Holborn, the lawyers settled on a virgin plain beyond the ugly houses which had sprung up on the north of Great Queen Street, and on the country side of Holborn. Speedily a new quarter arose, extending from Gray's Inn on the east to Southampton Row on the West, and lying between Holborn and the line of Ormond Street, Red Lion Street, Bedford Row, Great Ormond Street, Little Ormond Street, Great James Street, and Little James Street were amongst its best thoroughfares; in its centre was Red Lion Square, and in its northwestern corner lay Queen's Square. Steadily enlarging its boundaries, it comprised at later dates Guildford Street, John's Street, Doughty Street, Mecklenburgh Square, Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury Square, Russell Square, Bedford Square—indeed, all the region lying between Gray's Inn Lane (on the east), Tottenham Court Road (on the west), Holborn (on the south), and a line running along the north of the Foundling Hospital and 'the squares.' Of course this large residential district was more than the lawyers required for themselves. It became and long remained a favorite quarter with merchants, physicians,[2] and surgeons; and until a recent date it comprised the mansions of many leading members of the aristocracy. But from its first commencement it was so intimately associated with the legal profession that it was often called the 'law quarter;' and the writer of this page has often heard elderly ladies and gentlemen speak of it as the 'old law quarter.'

Although lawyers were the earliest householders in this new quarter, its chief architect encountered at first strong opposition from a section of the legal profession. Anxious to preserve the rural character of their neighborhood, the gentlemen of Gray's Inn were greatly displeased with the proposal to lay out Holborn Fields in streets and squares. Under date June 10, 1684, Narcissus Luttrell wrote in his diary—"Dr. Barebone, the great builder, having some time since bought the Red Lyon Fields, near Graie's Inn walks, to build on, and having for that purpose employed severall workmen to goe on with the same, the gentlemen of Graie's Inn took notice of it, and, thinking it an injury to them, went with a considerable body of 100 persons; upon which the workmen assaulted the gentlemen, and flung bricks at them, and the gentlemen at them again. So a sharp engagement ensued, but the gentlemen routed them at last, and brought away one or two of the workmen to Graie's Inn; in this skirmish one or two of the gentlemen and servants of the house were hurt, and severall of the workmen."

James Ralph's remarks on the principal localities of this district are interesting. "Bedford Row," he says, "is one of the most noble streets that London has to boast of, and yet there is not one house in it which deserves the least attention." He tells us that "Ormond Street is another place of pleasure, and that side of it next the Fields is, beyond question, one of the most charming situations about town." This 'place of pleasure' is now given up for the most part to hospitals and other charitable institutions, and to lodging-houses of an inferior sort. Passing on to Bloomsbury Square, and speaking of the Duke of Bedford's residence, which stood on the North side of the square, he says, "Then behind it has the advantage of most agreeable gardens, and a view of the country, which would make a retreat from the town almost unnecessary, besides the opportunity of exhibiting another prospect of the building, which would enrich the landscape and challenge new approbation." This was written in 1736. At that time the years of two generations were appointed to pass away ere the removal of Bedford House should make way for Lower Bedford Place, leading into Russell Square.

So late as the opening years of George III.'s reign, Queen's Square enjoyed an unbroken prospect in the direction of Highgate and Hampstead. 'The Foreigner's Guide: or a Necessary and Instructive Companion both to the Foreigner and Native, in their Tours through the Cities of London and Westminster' (1763), contains the following passage:—"Queen's Square, which is pleasantly situated at the extreme part of the town, has a fine open view of the country, and is handsomely built, as are likewise the neighboring streets—viz., Southampton Row, Ormond Street, &c. In this last is Powis House, so named from the Marquis of Powis, who built the present stately structure in the year 1713. It is now the town residence of the Earl of Hardwicke, late Lord Chancellor. The apartments are noble, and the whole edifice is commendable for its situation, and the fine prospect of the country. Not far from thence is Bloomsbury Square. This square is commendable for its situation and largeness. On the North side is the house of the Duke of Bedford. This building was erected from a design of Inigo Jones, and is very elegant and spacious." From the duke's house in Bloomsbury Square and his surrounding property, the political party, of which he was the Chief, obtained the nickname of the Bloomsbury Gang.

Chief Justice Holt died March 5, 1710, at his house[3] in Bedford Row. In Red Lion Square Chief Justice Raymond had the town mansion wherein he died on April 15, 1733; twelve years after Sir John Pratt, Lord Camden's father, died at his house in Ormond Street. On December 15, 1761, Chief Justice Willes died at his house in Bloomsbury Square. Chagrin at missing the seals through his own arrogance, when they had been actually offered to him, was supposed to be a principal cause of the Chief Justice's death. His friends represented that he died of a broken heart; to which assertion flippant enemies responded that no man ever had a heart after living seventy-four years. Murray for many years inhabited a handsome house in Lincoln's Inn Fields; but his name is more generally associated with Bloomsbury Square, where stood the house which was sacked and burnt by the Gordon rioters. In Bloomsbury Square our grandfathers used to lounge, watching the house of Edward Law, subsequently Lord Ellenborough, in the hope of seeing Mrs. Law, as she watered the flowers of her balcony. Mrs. Law's maiden name was Towry, and, as a beauty, she remained for years the rage of London. Even at this date there remain a few aged gentlemen whose eyes sparkle and whose checks flush when they recall the charms of the lovely creature who became the wife of ungainly Edward Law, after refusing him on three separate occasions.

On becoming Lord Ellenborough and Chief Justice, Edward Law moved to a great mansion in St. James's Square, the size of which he described to a friend by saying: "Sir, if you let off a piece of ordnance in the hall, the report is not heard in the bedrooms." In this house the Chief Justice expired, on December 13, 1818. Speaking of Lord Ellenborough's residence in St. James's Square, Lord Campbell says: "This was the first instance of a common law judge moving to the 'West End.' Hitherto all the common law judges had lived within a radius of half a mile from Lincoln's Inn; but they are now spread over the Regent's Park, Hyde Park Gardens, and Kensington Gore."

Lord Harwicke and Lord Thurlow have been more than once mentioned as inhabitants of Ormond Street.

Eldon's residences may be noticed with advantage in this place. On leaving Oxford and settling in London, he took a small house for himself and Mrs. Scott in Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane. About this dwelling he wrote to his brother Henry:—"I have got a house barely sufficient to hold my small family, which (so great is the demand for them here) will, in rent and taxes, cost me annually six pounds." To this house he used to point in the days of his prosperity, and, in allusion to the poverty which he never experienced, he would add, "There was my first perch. Many a time have I run down from Cursitor Street to Fleet Market and bought sixpenn'orth of sprats for our supper." After leaving Cursitor Street, he lived in Carey Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, where also, in his later years, he believed himself to have endured such want of money that he and his wife were glad to fill themselves with sprats. When he fixed this anecdote upon Carey Street, the old Chancellor used to represent himself as buying the sprats in Clare Market instead of Fleet Market. After some successful years he moved his household from the vicinity of Lincoln's Inn, and took a house in the law quarter, selecting one of the roomy houses (No. 42) of Gower Street, where he lived when as Attorney General he conducted the futile prosecutions of Hardy, Horne Tooke, and Thelwall, in 1794.

On quitting Gower Street, Eldon took the house in Bedford Square, which witnessed so many strange scenes during his tenure of the seals, and also during his brief exclusion from office. In Bedford Square he played the part of chivalric protector to the Princess of Wales, and chuckled over the proof-sheets of that mysterious 'book' by the publication of which the injured wife and the lawyer hoped to take vengeance on their common enemy. There the Chancellor, feeling it well to protract his flirtation with the Princess of Wales, entertained her in the June of 1808, with a grand banquet, from which Lady Eldon was compelled by indisposition to be absent. And there, four years later, when he was satisfied that her Royal Highness's good opinion could be of no service to him, the crafty, self-seeking minister gave a still more splendid dinner to the husband whose vices he had professed to abhor, whose meanness of spirit he had declared the object of his contempt. "However," writes Lord Campbell, with much satiric humor, describing this alliance between the selfish voluptuary and the equally selfish lawyer, "he was much comforted by having the honor, at the prorogation, of entertaining at dinner his Royal Highness the Regent, with whom he was now a special favorite, and who, enjoying the splendid hospitality of Bedford Square, forgot that the Princess of Wales had sat in the same room; at the same table; on the same chair; had drunk of the same wine; out of the same cup; while the conversation had turned on her barbarous usage, and the best means of publishing to the world her wrongs and his misconduct."

Another of the Prince Regent's visits to Bedford Square is surrounded with comic circumstances and associations. In the April of 1815, a mastership of chancery became vacant by the death of Mr. Morris; and forthwith the Chancellor was assailed with entreaties from every direction for the vacant post. For two months Eldon, pursuing that policy of which he was a consummate master, delayed to appoint; but on June 23, he disgusted the bar and shocked the more intelligent section of London society, by conferring the post on Jekyll, the courtly bon vivant and witty descendant of Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls. Amiable, popular, and brilliant, Jekyll received the congratulations of his numerous personal friends; but beyond the circle of his private acquaintance the appointment created lively dissatisfaction—dissatisfaction which was heightened rather than diminished by the knowledge that the placeman's good fortune was entirely due to the personal importunity of the Prince Regent, who called at the Chancellor's house, and having forced his way into the bedroom, to which Eldon was confined by an attack of gout, refused to take his departure without a promise that his friend should have the vacant place. How this royal influence was applied to the Chancellor, is told in the 'Anecdote Book.'

Fortunately Jekyll was less incompetent for the post than his enemies had declared, and his friends admitted. He proved a respectable master, and held his post until age and sickness compelled him to resign it; and then, sustained in spirits by the usual retiring pension, he sauntered on right mirthfully into the valley of the shadow of death. On the day after his retirement, the jocose veteran, meeting Eldon in the street, observed:—"Yesterday, Lord Chancellor, I was your master; to-day I am my own."

From Bedford Square, Lord Eldon, for once following the fashion, moved to Hamilton Place, Piccadilly. With the purpose of annoying him the 'Queen's friends,' during the height of the 'Queen Caroline agitation,' proposed to buy the house adjoining the Chancellor's residence in Hamilton Place, and to fit it up for the habitation of that not altogether meritorious lady. Such an arrangement would have been an humiliating as well as exasperating insult to a lawyer who, as long as the excitement about the poor woman lasted, would have been liable to affront whenever he left his house or looked through the windows facing Hamilton Place. The same mob that delighted in hallooing round whatever house the Queen honored with her presence, would have varied their 'hurrahs' for the lady with groans for the lawyer who, after making her wrongs the stalking-horse of his ambition, had become one of her chief oppressors. Eldon determined to leave Hamilton Place on the day which should see the Queen enter it; and hearing that the Lords of the Treasury were about to assist her with money for the purchase of the house, he wrote to Lord Liverpool, protesting against an arrangement which would subject him to annoyance at home and to ridicule out of doors. "I should," he wrote, "be very unwilling to state anything offensively, but I cannot but express my confidence that Government will not aid a project which must remove the Chancellor from his house the next hour that it takes effect, and from his office at the same time." This decided attitude caused the Government to withdraw their countenance from the project; whereupon a public subscription was opened for its accomplishment. Sufficient funds were immediately proffered; and the owner of the mansion had verbally made terms with the patriots, when the Chancellor, outbidding them, bought the house himself. "I had no other means," he wrote to his daughter, "of preventing the destruction of my present house as a place in which I could live, or which anybody else would take. The purchase-money is large, but I have already had such offers, that I shall not, I think, lose by it."

Russell Square—where Lord Loughborough (who knows aught of the Earl of Rosslyn?) had his town house, after leaving Lincoln's Inn Fields, and where Charles Abbott (Lord Tenterden) established himself on leaving the house in Queen Square, into which he married during the summer of 1795—maintained a quasi-fashionable repute much later than the older and therefore more interesting parts of the 'old law quarter.' Theodore Hook's disdain for Bloomsbury is not rightly appreciated by those who fail to bear in mind that the Russell Square of Hook's time was tenanted by people who—though they were unknown to 'fashion,' in the sense given to the word by men of Brummel's habit and tone—had undeniable status amongst the aristocracy and gentry of England. With some justice the witty writer has been charged with snobbish vulgarity because he ridiculed humble Bloomsbury for being humble. His best defence is found in the fact that his extravagant scorn was not directed at helpless and altogether obscure persons so much as at an educated and well-born class who laughed at his caricatures, and gave dinners at which he was proud to be present. Though it fails to clear the novelist of the special charge, this apology has a certain amount of truth; and in so far as it palliates some of his offences against good taste and gentle feeling, by all means let him have the full benefit of it. Criticism can afford to be charitable to the clever, worthless man, now that no one admires or tries to respect him. Again, it may be advanced, in Hook's behalf, that political animosity—a less despicable, though not less hurtful passion than love of gentility—contributed to Hook's dislike of the quarter on the north side of Holborn. As a humorist he ridiculed, as a panderer to fashionable prejudices he sneered at, Bloomsbury; but as a tory he cherished a genuine antagonism to the district of town that was associated in the public mind with the wealth and ascendency of the house of Bedford. Anyhow, the Russell Square neighborhood—although it was no longer fashionable, as Belgravia and Mayfair are fashionable at the present day—remained the locality of many important families, at the time when Mr. Theodore Hook was pleased to assume that no one above the condition of a rich tradesman or second-rate attorney lived in it. Of the lawyers whose names are mournfully associated with the square itself are Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd. In 1818, the year of his destruction by his own hand, Sir Samuel Romilly lived there; and Talfourd had a house on the east side of the square up to the time of his lamented death in 1854.

That Theodore Hook's ridicule of Bloomsbury greatly lessened for a time the value of its houses there is abundant evidence. When he deluged the district with scornful satire, his voice was a social power, to which a considerable number of honest people paid servile respect. His clever words were repeated; and Bloomsbury having become a popular by-word for contempt, aristocratic families ceased to live, and were reluctant to invest money, in its well-built mansions. But Hook only accelerated a movement which had for years been steadily though silently making progress. Erskine knew Red Lion Square when every house was occupied by a lawyer of wealth and eminence, if not of titular rank; but before he quitted the stage, barristers had relinquished the ground in favor of opulent shopkeepers. When an ironmonger became the occupant of a house in Red Lion Square on the removal of a distinguished counsel, Erskine wrote the epigram—

"This house, where once a lawyer dwelt,
Is now a smith's,—alas!
How rapidly the iron age
Succeeds the age of brass."

These lines point to a minor change in the social arrangements of London, which began with the century, and was still in progress when Erskine had for years been mouldering in his grave. In 1823, the year of Erskine's death, Chief Baron Richards expired in his town house, in Great Ormond Street. In the July of the following year Baron Wood—i.e., George Wood, the famous special pleader—died at his house in Bedford Square, about seventeen months after his resignation of his seat in the Court of Exchequer to John Hullock.

At the present time the legal fraternity has deserted Bloomsbury. The last of the Judges to depart was Chief Baron Pollock, who sold his great house in Queen Square at a quite recent date. With the disappearance of this venerable and universally respected judge, the legal history of the neighborhood may be said to have closed. Some wealthy solicitors still live in Russell Square and the adjoining streets; a few old-fashioned barristers still linger in Upper Bedford Place and Lower Bedford Place. Guilford Street and Doughty Street, and the adjacent thoroughfares of the same class, still number a sprinkling of rising juniors, literary barristers, and fairly prosperous attorneys. Perhaps the ancient aroma of the 'old law quarter'—Mesopotamia, us it is now disrespectfully termed—is still strong and pleasant enough to attract a few lawyers who cherish a sentimental fondness for the past. A survey of the Post Office Directory creates an impression that, compared with other neighborhoods, the district north and northeast of Bloomsbury Square still possesses more than an average number of legal residents; but it no longer remains the quarter of the lawyers.

There still resides in Mecklenburgh Square a learned Queen's Counsel, for whose preservation the prayers of the neighborhood constantly ascend. To his more scholarly and polite neighbors this gentleman is an object of intellectual interest and anxious affection. As the last of an extinct species, as a still animate Dodo, as a lordly Mohican who has outlived his tribe, this isolated counselor of her Gracious Majesty is watched by heedful eyes whenever he crosses his threshold. In the morning, as he paces from his dwelling to chambers, his way down Doughty Street and John Street, and through Gray's Inn Gardens, is guarded by men anxious for his safety. Shreds of orange-peel are whisked from the pavement on which he is about to tread; and when he crosses Holborn he walks between those who would imperil their lives to rescue him from danger. The gatekeeper in Doughty Street daily makes him low obeisance, knowing the historic value and interest of his courtly presence. Occasionally the inhabitants of Mecklenburgh Square whisper a fear that some sad morning their Q.C. may flit away without giving them a warning. Long may it be before the residents of the 'Old Law Quarter' shall wail over the fulfillment of this dismal anticipation!