by Walter Thornbury.
Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.3 #10 (Aug 1867).
IV. St. James's-square, Tavistock-square, Euston-square, Queen-square, Hanover-square
St. James's-square was built about sixteen years after the Restoration. The crême de la crême lived there then; and the swarthy, ill-favoured, witty king must have strolled across it a thousand times, with Rochester by his side, and a trail of petted spaniels at his heels, on his way to a game at Pall-mall, or to take boat with his ladies at Whitehall-stairs on hot summer evenings, when St. James's-park was too dusty, and the fraîcheur of the air on the river, as Dryden affectedly calls it, was agreeable, and wafted the echoes of the French horns and the chalumeaux pleasantly from the Chelsea to the Battersea shore. Handsome Sydney; Grammont the beau; the malign Duke of York, with his vulgar wife and ugly mistresses; that portly scoundrel the Earl of Oxford; Killigrew the farceur; St. Evremont the philosophic epicurean, with the large tumour on his forehead; beautiful Miss Jennings; incomparable Miss Stuart (the Britannia of our halfpenny); that beautiful fury the Duchess of Cleveland; that dark good-for-nothing Duchess of Portsmouth—have all flitted phantom-like across this square, and vanished in the darkness from whence they came.
In 1677, the rate-book of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, consulted by indefatigable Mr. Peter Cunningham (sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes), shows that then, on the east side, lived the Marquis of Blandford, the Countess of Warwick, and the Earl of Oxford. This last was the nobleman who beguiled the Roxana of the day into a cruel sham marriage, his lordship's kettledrummer being the pseudo-chaplain. On the west side resided Lord Purbeck, Lord Halifax, Sir Allen Apsley, Madam Churchill, and Madam Davis. On the north side, Mr. John Benet, Mr. Shaw, the Earl of Clarendon, Mr. Bearbone, John Aunger, the French ambassador, Laurence Hyde, Sir Hitch Lucy, the Earl of Essex, the Earl of St. Albans, and such grand folk. The air must have been heavy with the perfume shaken from their silken robes, fans, gloves, and Chedreux wigs. A page from a directory does not seem to promise very agreeable reading; and yet the very sound of these names is, we are not ashamed to confess it, pleasant to our ears.
Earl of Clarendon. This was the very year that, tormented by his enemies, taunted with selling Dunkirk, with effecting his master's marriage with an ugly and unsuitable Portuguese princess, and with building a vainglorious palace out of stone intended for St. Paul's, the historian of the civil war fled to France.
Laurence Hyde. This was the reprobate Rochester, who, when his lampoon on the "mutton-eating king" proved too severe even for careless Charles, turned quacksalver and astrologer on Tower-hill. He lived a reprobate, but died repentant. He was not quite bad to the core.
The French ambassador. This was the wily watchful Barillon, who bought Charles over with French gold; and not only Charles, but half his court. If he could only be quiet and have his pleasure, Charles would have sold the crown-jewels, and bartered Ireland for a brood of spaniel puppies. The publication of Barillon's accounts startled the world by the discovery that even the noblest Roman of them all, Algernon Sydney, had received bribes—from some mistaken adoption, no doubt, of the vile jesuitical axiom of "doing evil that good may come." Everyone had his price then, and statesmen could be bought like cattle.<
Madam Davis is the coarse dancer whom Pepys so often mentions as so shameless and audacious at the theatre in trying to win the king's glance, and to browbeat her rivals.
Madam Churchill was the favourite of James the Second, the sister of the future Duke of Marlborough, by whose good graces he first obtained court influence, and the mother of that vigorous general in Spain, the Duke of Berwick.
The Marquis of Blandford was Lewis de Duras, afterwards Earl of Faversham, an incompetent commander, who displayed his laziness and incompetence in the campaign against Monmouth.
The Earl of Dorset, that idol of the wits and poets of two generations, had a house on the west side of St. James's-square in 1678. "I know not how it is, but Lord Buckhurst," said Rochester, with admiring envy, "may do what he will, yet he is never in the wrong." This was the nobleman who when at sea, the night before one of those tremendous battles with the Dutchmen, found time and gaiety to write or revise that exquisite tripping bit of gallantry,
"To all you ladies now on land
We men at sea indite."
Dorset was born under a special star, if ever a man was. The world was never tired of praising him, and no one seemed jealous of his merits. The poets were all through life his bodyguard. Dryden made a model critic of him, and praised his satires; Prior liked his generosity and candour; Waller studied his verse for harmony, his prose for taste; Butler and Wycherly were introduced by him to the town; the Duke of Buckingham deferred to him; Charles the Second admired his distinguished manners; La Fontaine and St. Evremont admitted he was a perfect master of the French belles lettres; Pope imitated him; and Dr. Johnson eulogised his elegance and judgment.
Dr. Sydenham, that great and learned physician of the reigns of Charles the Second and James the Second, wrestled with Death, and threw him very often too, in his consulting-room at his house in St. James's-square. Son of a Dorsetshire squire, Commoner of Wadham, Fellow of All Souls, Bachelor of Medicine, then captain in Cromwell's invincible army, and physician in Westminster, Sydenham must have had much to ponder over, as, in the pleasant twilight of his life, he leaned on his gold-headed cane and paced round this square, resting on the arm of his young friend Blackmore, that intolerable poet so cruelly badgered by Dryden and Pope—transfixed, in fact, by the shafts of two generations of poetical satirists.
It was Sydenham who said, with a bitter contempt for the science of his own day: "What course of study should a medical student pursue? Why, read Don Quixote. It is a very good book: I read it still."
Now, except the Baratarian physician's severe opinions on the matter of diet, and some true observations on monomania, that noble Spanish book does not contain many medical axioms: but the doctor was wise in his generation. There had then been no great English physician except Harvey, the final discoverer of the circulation of the blood. The medical books then were a miserable mélange of alchemy, astrology, and old woman's superstitions. The Royal Society was in its babyhood, quite as puzzle-headed as the outer world, and chiefly intent on mandrakes, unicorn's horns, and experiments with mercury.
In a dedication to Dr. Mapletoft, a friend who translated his works into Latin (the universal language of the learned all through Europe), Sydenham tacitly contemns books, and places them utterly below the results of personal experience and observation, which are the only real basis of medical knowledge.
"The medical art," he says, "could not be learned so well and so surely as by use and experience; and he who would pay the nicest and most accurate attention to the symptoms of distempers would succeed best in finding out the true means of cure."
Early in life, Sydenham, like many other honest men before and since, tried to get on without humbug—that is, without yielding to the weakness or the baseness of ordinary human nature. When consulted by his patients for the first time, he used to studiously listen to their complaints, and then say: "Well, I will consider your case, and in a few days will order something for you."
This was the true way to avoid shooting in the dark. But men racked with fever, or morbidly apprehensive of a pole-axe blow from apoplexy, were not in a condition of mind to be very patient. Two-thirds of such patients at the time of the Plague of London forgot to come again; so Sydenham, unwilling to starve, fell into the old way, prescribed at a first glance, and from ten minutes' diagnosis of perhaps a twenty years' disease, did his best to help life and expel its enemy.
Sydenham, whom Locke praised (and Locke's praise was praise indeed), prided himself on avoiding such fantastic though ingenious theories as Willis's, and on observing and closely following nature. Boerhaave and Haller praised his treatment of small-pox, his cooling regimen for fevers, and his admirable use of Peruvian bark, then almost a new medicine. In that full-blooded age, we may perhaps pardon him for having been a little too much of the Sangrado, and carrying bleeding to excess. He seems, though neglected at court (perhaps rather a compliment when a court is degraded), to have ripened into that most delightful and by no means rare character—a benevolent, candid, sincere, amiable old physician.
There is a racy old story of a fat puffy old gentleman, who one day, after toiling up Holborn-hill in the sun, stopped at the summit to rest and to mop his forehead. An artful young dodger seeing him, accosted him:
"Why, old un, you're out of breath!"
Pouf, pouf! "Yes, boy, I am."
"And very red too, old un!"
"Yes, yes, you boy, yes."
"Jolly well tired?"
"Yes."
"Very well, then, old un; here goes."
So saying, the audacious young rascal butted his head into the old gentleman's waistcoat, slipped his watch out of his fob, with the same motion of the hand his purse out of his pocket, and in a jiffy darted down the nearest alley.
Quite as good a story is told of Sydenham. One pleasant summer evening the old sage sat at his ground-floor window in St. James's-square, very feeble and extremely gouty, ruminating over the wild gallants he had buried, the children he had seen grow up, and the alleviations to human misery that Providence had enabled him to furnish. A tall silver tankard full of the doctor's favourite and harmless beverage, that "good familiar creature" small-beer, stood on the table at his elbow, and in the orange liquid floated a pleasantly-bitter sprig of rosemary. All at once a lean hungry face stared in wistfully at the open window, and a quick, thin, dirty hand snatched the tankard, and was off with it unpursued; for the angry doctor was too lame to move to the bell, and too feeble to raise cries to be heard by his servants.
In Shadwell's and Dryden's time St. James's-square remained the centre of fashion. The Dukes of Norfolk held No. 21, at the southeast corner of the square, as their fortress. It was probably the house of the Dukes of St. Albans, who left it in 1683, on the death of Henry Jermyn, Earl of St. Albans. In old Norfolk House that young prince, afterwards George III., was born; and here he spent the true golden age of life and rolled about in his cradle, careless of American discontent or French agitation. Sixty years after, he was wandering, crazed and blind, through the solitary rooms at Windsor, alternately raging at Dr. Willis, and consoling himself with memories of Handel on the harpsichord. Mr. Peter Cunningham tells us that the present Norfolk House was built in 1742, from a design by Brettingham. The portico was not added till 1842. In this mansion "Jockey of Norfolk," that enormous tun of a duke, so famous for his conviviality at the Beef-steak Club, and his Whiggery at the Crown-and-Anchor meetings, must have often rolled home,
"Round as a tub and liquored every chink,"
after eating acres of rump-steak and swallowing four or five bottles of port in company with Captain Morris and other bon-vivants of the day.
The great Duke of Ormond, that stanch and honest old Irish officer, whom audacious Captain Blood tried to carry off on horseback to hang at Tyburn, lived in St. James's-square all through the disgraceful reign of Charles the Second, in a house on the north-west side, next to the last Earl of Oxford's. This excellent statesman, who did so much for Ireland, here entertained his friend Lord Clarendon, and shared loyally in his disgrace, till the Duke of York took him up, to upset the intrigues of the Cabal. Honest man, sound thinker, and faithful friend,—
"True as the dial to the sun,
Although it be not shone upon,"—
Ormond moves among the witlings, fops, elegant rascals, and accomplished vauriens and roués of Charles's court like an old war-horse feeding stolidly in a meadow all in a flutter with summer butterflies. He and Rupert are pleasant to think of, after such men as figure in Grammont's thoughtless memoirs and Dryden's infamous comedies. Ormond House, valued then at 300l. a year (equal to treble that sum in our current money), was sold in 1719 for 7500l, and was part of the estates forfeited by the duke's son on his attainder. The memory of the old family still lives in the name of an adjacent mews—Ormond-yard.
This same fashionable square was also honoured, as Charles's court would have considered, by being the residence of Catherine Sedley (afterwards Countess of Dorchester), mistress of that untoward bigot, James the Second. It is an old libertine's bitterest punishment to see the disgrace of his own daughter, and Sedley felt the bitterness. He was active for the Reformation, saying with malicious humour, "I do it from a feeling of gratitude; for since his majesty has made my daughter a countess, I shall certainly do all I can to make his daughter a queen."
Unfortunate James, no one had taken the trouble to be indignant with him, as in the case of the amours of his brother Charles.
Before the flight of James, Henry Sidney, Earl of Romney,—"the rash Adonis" and "the handsome Sidney of Grammont,"—occupied. Romney House, afterwards the Erechtheum Club, and in this square displayed his handsome figure and fine limbs. William the Third, that dry hook-nosed Prince of Orange, frequently visited the beau at Romney House; and we can picture the prudent Dutchman, in his stiff jack-boots, square-cut laced coat, and flowing lace steenkirk, alighting with his friend Bentinck at Sidney's door. The gallant died in 1704, and was buried in the chancel of St. James's, Westminster. In a newspaper of 1703 there is a reward of 200 guineas offered for the apprehension of some thieves who had coolly in the night cut down and carried off a tree that grew opposite Romney House.
And now let us pass on to the powder-and-patch period of Pope. It was the fashion in the time of the bard of Twickenham to deride botanists, antiquarians, and etymologists, who were all foolishly classed as mere crazed hobby-hunters. Pope assigns to an Earl of Pembroke, then living in St. James's-square in 1714, and a great antiquarian,
" . . . . statues, dirty gods, and coins."
At another tenant of this square also the "little hater" darted his ever-ready sting. In No. 6 (now Bristol House) lived Sporus, that thing of silk,
"That mere white-scented curd of ass's milk;"
really, to judge from his letters, an old fop, but not an old fool by any means. Mr. Pope had the vanity of a dwarf, and had old grudges against Lord Hervey, who had great secret influence at court. It is not pleasant to be called Sporus, and no doubt Pope's works were not popular at Bristol House.
The glory of the square, indeed, came to a climax when that bluff sturdy statesman, Sir Robert Walpole, lived here till 1735, when George the Second offered him a house in Downing-street, which had just then become vacant by the death of the Hanoverian minister. Sir Robert would only accept it, however, on condition of its being made an appanage of the first lord of the Treasury for ever. If every man had his price in those days, no doubt many a Tory's virtue yielded in this square to Sir Robert's eloquent guineas. Many a wistful Jacobite must have paced up and down it in hopes to catch Sir Robert at a safe time for a quiet stab that might help on the Pretender's cause.
In Queen Anne's time the Duke of Northumberland lived here, as well as one of Pope's friends, the Earl of Bathurst, a fellow-statesman of Harley and St.John. Polite, virtuous, wise, cheerful, Bathurst seems to have been truly worthy of the friendship of Pope, Swift, and Addison. He died at Cirencester, in 1775, aged seventy-one. Within a month of his death this heart of oak had ridden two hours every morning and drunk his daily bottle of wine. Fifty years before Dr. Cheyne had assured him he would not live seven years if he did not stop his wine.
At No. 2 resided that fine old Cornish admiral, Boscawen. He sank swarms of French frigates in his time, and smote and shattered Louis's ships whenever he met the white flag. He fought well in India and in South America. One of his greatest actions was under Anson off Finisterre, when he took an entire covey of ten French frigates (1747). He was wounded in that engagement. The iron street-posts in front of his house in this square were old cannon taken in this grand sea-fight. Lord Chatham when prime minister paid Boscawen a fine compliment; and it is a compliment that epitomises his merits as an admiral. "When I apply," said the minister, 'to other officers respecting any expedition I am projecting, they always raise difficulties; but Boscawen always discovers expedients."
But by far the pleasantest tradition of this historical square to our minds is one that connects it with the memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson. That great man had given up the unfortunate school at Edial, near Lichfield, which had indeed already well-nigh given up him, and come to London with his head pupil Garrick to push his way among the booksellers. In company with that clever scapegrace Savage, Johnson was doing translations for Cave at St. John's-gate, besides writing Irene, and attending to the debates in parliament, but he was still poor, and compelled to be thrifty. He told Reynolds that one particular night was spent by Savage and himself walking round St. James's-square for want of a lodging; but he added: "We were not at all depressed by our situation"—(were they not rich in hope, youth, and talent?)—"but in high spirits and brimful of patriotism, resolved we would stand by our country." Delightful picture; it reads like a passage from the Vicar of Wakefield.
Perhaps, as the two Bohemians paced along, denouncing Walpole, Johnson stopped his rakish friend at No. 3, on the east side—the Duke of Leeds'—and hummed a street-ballad of the day, which he always liked to repeat for the sake of its delicious naïveté:
"When the Duke of Leeds shall married be
To a fine young lady of high quality,
How happy will that gentlewoman be
In his grace of Leeds' good company!
She shall have all that's fine and fair,
And the best of silk and satin shall wear,
And ride in a coach to take the air,
And have a house in St. James's-square."
That house in the square the street-poet evidently thought the end of all things, and dared go no farther.
At No. 15 there lived that portentously wise-looking man, Lord Chancellor Thurlow. What man would not look wise with eyebrows like small heads of hair? It is well that, though the biographer has to say arrogant, morose, mistaken Thurlow, he has also to add, honest Thurlow. If he helped Lord North to lose America for us, he assisted Dr. Johnson; and that act covers a multitude of sins.
At No. 14 lived that virulent man, Sir Philip Francis—now, from the internal evidence supplied by the book, generally supposed (but we sincerely believe erroneously) to have been the dreaded Junius. After the Atlantics of good ink wasted on this question, the bulk of evidence is certainly in favour of Junius having been Francis; yet there is strong reason to suppose the writer of those famous epistles was a much humbler and less-known contemporary.
At No. 11 lived the great book-collector, John Duke of Roxburghe; and here his precious folios were sold and scattered to the winds.
The large house at the north corner of King-street was once an object of horror to London mobs. It was the hated Lord Castlereagh's mansion; and here that cold arrogant man, when his mind began to give way under the pressure of a secret and horrible conspiracy, left for Foot's Cray, where he killed himself with a white-handled penknife he had been seen to buy from a Jew boy who was waiting for the coaches at the White Horse Cellar. The mob frequently pelted the glass out of the windows of the house of this narrow-minded minister.
No. 22 is the town-house of the Bishops of London. The Church was as aristocratic when bishops lived in Holborn; but what bishop would live eastward now? Yet perhaps the half-savage costermongers of Whitechapel require the presence of the descendants of the poor fishermen of Galilee quite as much as the fashionable tenants of our club-houses do.
No. 18, Lichfield House, built by that refined and useful antiquarian architect, "Athenian Stuart," was where the Lichfield-House Compact was formed by O'Connell in 1835. The house where the Erechtheum once disported was the repository of Joseph Wedgwood, the founder of the Staffordshire Etruria; that enlightened and energetic man who gave the first impulse to a better state of things in our commoner domestic manufactures. The Greek curves and Greek simplicity taught a purer taste to our potters; and the English began at last to see that true art transforms even the meanest objects into things of beauty. The equestrian statue of that somewhat repelling hero and not too victorious general, William III., is by the younger Bacon. The pedestal waited for the statue from 1732 to 1808.
In 1780, when London was on fire in a dozen places and the blue cockades poured into this square, where the country militia regiments soon afterwards came to bivouac, some of the rioters, drunk with their triumph and Mr. Langdale's gin, tossed their spolia opima—the keys of Newgate—into the basin in the centre of the square, where they were found many years afterwards, when Lord George and half his crack-brained abettors were dead.
No. 4 (Earl de Grey's) boasts, or did boast in 1849—when that not very profound German art critic, Dr. Waagen, was in London—a fine collection of pictures. The series of portraits by Vandyke (many of them whole-lengths and life-size) are incomparable, and show the great Fleming in all his manners. The portrait of Charles Maberly (half-length) is of admirable impasto and of a light brilliant tone; the gallant manliness of Vandyke, so graceful without being foppish, so dignified without being self-conscious, is here seen to the utmost advantage. There are two fine poetical landscapes by Claude, for those who like the sugared and somewhat mechanical formality of that artificial yet admirable painter; a fine vigorous work by Salvator Rosa, always audacious and picturesque; and two charming cattle-pieces by Adrian Vandervelde. The collection is crowned by a great work of Titian's more playful manner, which came from the Orleans Gallery; it is known as "La Cassette de Titien;" but it is surpassed by a picture of the same kind in the Berlin Museum. In the St. James's-square picture the princely girl is holding up in her raised hand a casket of jewels on a dish; at Berlin she is lifting a dish of fruit, &c. The turn of the head is particularly happy, and the painting of the shoulders magical for roundness and voluptuous grace.
Having now torn ourself away from this square of a thousand associations, our future course must be somewhat erratic and zigzag. To use a sporting phrase, we must make a scratch pack of the other squares, and let them follow in any order they choose.
Tavistock-square derives its name from the title borne by the father of the celebrated patriot, William Lord Russell, who lost his head so unjustly in Charles the Second's time for a conspiracy in which he had never been engaged. As a small recompense for his loss, William made the father Marquis of Tavistock and Duke of Bedford. Pinkerton the historian lived at No. 9 in Tavistock-place, leading an abandoned miserable existence. Mary Ann Clark, the bricklayer's daughter, afterwards the mischievous mistress of the Duke of York, lived for some time at No. 34. That shrewd Scotch novelist, Galt, afterwards had this house, and subsequently Douce the antiquarian.
No. 37 is a house memorable to scientific men, because Francis Baily, President of the Royal Astronomical Society, lived there from 1825 to 1844. Some great experiments were made there in his time, soundings taken as it were among the stars, to discover where that great buoyant old ship, the Earth, hails from, and whither she is bound. The house, Sir John Herschell describes, stands isolated in a garden, so as to escape the vibration produced by carriages. In the upper part of the house is an observatory; and in this observatory, without scales or measures, a man with a far-seeing brain actually contrived to weigh the Earth! yes; its bulk and figure were here calculated as nicely as if it were no larger than a Dutch cheese, and its pounds avoirdupois put down in the neatest figures. By this and other discoveries the standard measure of the British nation, Sir John says, was perpetuated, and "the pendulum experiments rescued from their chief source of inaccuracy."
Tavistock House, the fine mansion near the north-west entrance to the square, was long the residence of James Perry, the celebrated editor of that great Whig organ, the Morning Chronicle. Tom Moore revelled here, warbled his melodies and sparkled out his bon-mots, many-coloured and full of fire as opals.
But the house has more interesting associations than that about it; for here for many years resided Mr. Charles Dickens. In its chambers arose those beautiful dreams which will delight us for ever; and here were first struck out many of those delicious oddities which will shake the sides of generations and generations yet unborn. When I pass I always look at the windows: Little Nell and Quilp, Mr. Pickwick and Sam, seem to smile at me from them; and I almost feel prepared to see a coach drive up to the door, and Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Tom Pinch, and the Cheeryble Brothers step out of it; or the door itself open, and out trip Dolly Varden, Kate Nickleby, or pretty childish Dora.
Euston-square is associated with the memory of that droll humourist, but not very high-principled man, Dr. Wolcot (Peter Pindar). He died here, in a house attached to Montgomery's nursery-gardens, now built over. Latterly, the pensioned old satirist became blind, infirm, lame, and asthmatic, and was at the mercy of his servants and some low legacy-hunters. He had been bought over by the government, who wanted to use him against the French Revolution, and contrived by a sop-in-the-pan to draw him off from his clever, but vulgar and pitiless, ridicule of poor respectable old George the Third. He had a great horror of death, and was often heard to say that with all his infirmities he would willingly take from nature a lease of five hundred years.
"When you are here, you are something," was his favourite remark; "but when dead, you are nothing."
His last words were touching: "Give me back my youth."
Queen-square was so called out of compliment to that not very interesting English sovereign, Queen Anne. In the time of Dodsley, the author of the Environs, the north side of the square was left open for the sake of a view of the adjacent green fields and the hills of Highgate and Hampstead. A story of Dr. Johnson's is pleasant to ruminate upon as we cross this square, which is indeed little changed since the days of red-heels, periwigs, and swords. At the north-west corner of Queen-square once lived Dr. Campbell, author of Lives of the Admirals and editor of the Biographia Britannica,—a plodding, industrious compiler he was. In Johnson's early times the Sunday-evening conversazioni of this learned and influential Scotchman were much attended by persons of eminence in science and literature. Johnson bore with these parties for a time, and then gave them up.
"I used to go pretty often to Campbell's on Sunday evening," he told Boswell, "till I began to consider that the shoals of Scotchmen who flocked about him might probably say, when anything of mine was well done, 'Ay, ay, he has learnt this of Cawmell!'"
The herculean doctor was always unjust to the Scotch.
Alderman Barber, who died in this square in 1741, should always be remembered with respect; for it was he who set up a monument in Poets' Corner to poor starved Butler, and those who delight in the fertility and matchless wit of Hudibras should by no means forget him as they turn into Queen-square. That much-maligned and very admirable early writer on art, Jonathan Richardson, the artist whom Hogarth rather cruelly caricatured, lived in Queen-square, and died there. This eminently respectable man studied under Riley, and imitated Kneller; he was the father-in-law of Hudson, Reynolds's first master, and a miserable painter. Hogarth, hating him because he was a mere "face-painter," and employed drapery men to put in his dress and backgrounds, ridiculed him in an unfair caricature, which he had, in a cooler moment, the good sense to suppress.
Hanover-square (the name recording the greatness of Queen Anne's fortunate but not very interesting successor) was built in 1718, and was at first called a street. In 1720 its inhabitants were the upper ten thousand—Lord Carpenter, Sir Theodore Jansen, Lord Hilsborough, the Duke of Montrose, and Lord Dunmore. On the north side, Colonel Fane, Mr. Sheldon, the Earl of Coventry, Lord Brooke, General Stewart, the Duke of Roxburgh, and General Evans. In the Strype of 1720, allusion is made to these new and splendid buildings on the way towards Tyburn, quite suburban then: "One of the houses is taken by my Lord Cowper, the late Lord High Chancellor of England; and a rumour is given that the gibbet at Tyburn is to be removed to Kingsland, to prevent the doleful processions passing by the north end of the new square." Pope's Lord Cobham had a house here. Ambrose Philips (namby-pamby Philips), who wrote the Persian pastorals, and was despised by Pope, died here in 1749; and Admiral Lord Rodney, who hit the French so hard in the West Indies, and gave the Spaniards such a buffet off Cape St. Vincent, died here in 1792. In 1754 the inner enclosure of the square was marked off with wooden posts. The statue of William Pitt, that arrogant-looking statesman, from whose upturned hat-peg of a nose, it used to be said, dangled the Opposition, cost 7000l.: it was Chantrey's work, and was set up in 1831. The Hanover-square Rooms, on the east side, were built by Sir John Gallini, one of the early managers of the Italian Opera, when the Opera was still a tender exotic and had scarcely yet struck root.
Such are a few of the traditions of some of our chief London squares; it would take a volume to garner up the legends of them all. Those quiet spots have been the battlegrounds of factions and the graveyards of many pleasant memories; their histories (however imperfectly sketched by us) are not undeserving of record—at least we have shown that it is not the Dome or the Abbey alone that furnish material for thought ; and most reflective people will feel more interest in a locality when they have been told that across that pavement Dr. Johnson lumbered, or at that house Nelson lived. Much of the scenery of the old stage is still around us; we tread the same old planks: it is only the actors that have changed.