now thinking of two friends we had lost, who once lived in the buildings behind us, Beauclerk and Garrick. 'Ay, Sir,' said he, tenderly, and two such friends as cannot be supplied.' Garrick expired on the 20th of January, 1779, in the back room of the first floor. Forty-three years afterwards, in October, 1822, his venerable widow, the once beautiful and celebrated Violette, quietly breathed her last, while seated in her arm-chair, in the front drawing-room of the same house. In John Street, Adelphi, are the apartments of the Society of Arts, established on the 22nd March, 1754. "The great room of the society," we are told, “was for several years the place where many persons chose to try, or to display, their oratorial abilities. Dr. Goldsmith, I remember, made an attempt at a speech, but was obliged to sit down in confusion. I once heard Dr. Johnson speak there, upon a subject relative to mechanics, with a propriety, perspicuity, and energy which excited general admiration."* Here are to be seen the six famous pictures by James Barry, which alone render it well worthy of a visit. William Wilberforce, when a young man, lived in the Adelphi. To the west of the Adelphi are York Buildings, deriving their name from the palace of the Archbishops of York, which anciently occupied their site. These buildings consist chiefly of George Street, Villiers Street, Duke Street, and Buckingham Street, so called from the last inhabitant of this princely palace, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. As Pennant observes-"Even the particle of is not forgotten, being preserved in Of-alley." At the end of Buckingham Street still stands the beautiful gateway or water-entrance to York House, the work of Inigo Jones. * Kippis, Biog. Brit., vol. vi., p. 266. The house in York Buildings, occupied by Peter the Great, during his visit to London in 1698, is said to have been the one in the east corner of Buckingham Street, overlooking the Thames. It has been since rebuilt. William the Third, who was unremitting in his attentions to his illustrious visitor, more than once paid a social visit to the Czar at his apartments in York Buildings. During one of those interviews there occurred an incident which, in a more stately and polished court, would have been strangely subversive of courtly decorum. "The King," writes the second Lord Dartmouth, "made the Czar a visit, in which an odd incident happened. The Czar had a favourite monkey which sat upon the back of his chair. As soon as the King was sat down, the monkey jumped upon him in some wrath, which discomposed the whole ceremonial, and most part of the time was afterwards spent in apologies for the monkey's misbehaviour." It was not improbably in the crowded thoroughfare of the Strand that the following still more amusing adventure occurred to the Czar. He was one day, we are told, walking in one of the streets of London, with the Marquis of Carmarthen, who had been selected to be his cicerone, when a porter, bearing a heavy weight upon his back, pushed against him with so much violence as to overturn him in the kennel. In the highest degree irritated, the Czar, immediately that he recovered his legs, made a rush at the offender, with the intention of striking him. Lord Carmarthen, however, apprehending that in a pugilistic encounter the porter would in all probability have the advantage, interfered with so much promptitude as to prevent further hostilities. Turning angrily to the porter-" Do you know," said the Marquis, "that this is the Czar ?" The man's countenance lighted up with an impudent grin :-" Czar!" he said, "we are all Czars here." The large building at the south-west corner of Buckingham Street was once the residence of Samuel Pepys, who took up his abode here in 1684. This house has since been inhabited by Etty, the Royal Academician, and Stanfield, the landscape painter. In the latter part of the reign of Charles the Second, Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset "The best good man, with the worst-natured muse resided in Buckingham Street, and in this street, near the water-side, a still more celebrated man, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, was residing in 1708. John Henderson, the actor, died in Buckingham Street in 1785. In Villiers Street the virtuous and high-minded John Evelyn was at one period a resident. "On the 17th of November, 1683," he writes, "I took a house in Villiers Street, York Buildings, for the winter, having many important concerns to dispatch, and for the education of my daughters." Sir Richard Steele was residing in this street in 1721. Close to Villiers Street, on the site of the great Charing Cross Railway Station stood till recently Hungerford Market, socalled from the once neighbouring town mansion of the Hungerfords of Fairleigh, in Somersetshire. Running parallel with Villiers Street is Craven Street, at No. 7 in which street the great philosopher Benjamin Franklin lived during the most momentous period of his residence in England, and here was visited and consulted by the great Lord Chatham. It has only recently been rebuilt. At No. 27, James Smith, one of the authors of the "Rejected Addresses," breathed his last on the 24th December, 1839. The following pleasing trifle, composed by him during his residence in this street, is perhaps familiar to most of our readers :— "In Craven Street, Strand, ten attorneys find place, And ten dark coal-barges are moored at its base; Fly, Honesty, fly! seek some safer retreat, For there's craft in the river and craft in the street." This epigram drew from Sir George Rose the following retort, said to have been written extempore at a dinnerparty: "Why should Honesty fly to some safer retreat, In Craven Street the Reverend James Hackman was lodging at the time when he shot Miss Ray under the Piazza of Covent Garden. The house adjoining Northumberland House, on the Strand side, was long the official residence of the Secretary of State for the time being. Here resided Sir Harry Vane the elder, at the period when he held that appointment under Charles the First, and here lived Sir Edward Nicholas when Secretary of State to Charles the Second. In Hartshorn Lane, now Northumberland Street, the parents of Ben Jonson were residing at the time when the future dramatist attended "a private school" in the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. Though I cannot," writes Fuller, "with all my industrious inquiry, find him in his cradle, I can fetch him from his long coats. When a little child he lived in Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross, where his mother married a bricklayer for her second husband." At the south end of Northumberland Street, near the Thames, stood the residence of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, whose position as an opulent timber merchant led to his appointment to the magistracy and to his untimely fate. RESIDENCES OF THE OLD NOBILITY IN THE STRAND. NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE.-STORY OF ITS FOUNDER.-HUNGERFORD HOUSE. -YORK HOUSE.-ITS MAGNIFICENCE WHEN POSSESSED BY THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.-DURHAM HOUSE.-SALISBURY AND WORCESTER HOUSES. SAVOY PALACE.—ITS HISTORY.-SAVOY CHAPEL.-D'OYLEY'S WAREHOUSE.— ARUNDEL HOUSE.-ESSEX HOUSE.-HISTORY OF THE EARLS OF ESSEX. NORT ORTHUMBERLAND House stands on the site of a chapel, or hospital, founded in the reign of Richard the Third by William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, by whom it was dedicated to St. Mary Rouncivall, and constituted by him an appanage to the priory of Roncesvalles, in Navarre. It was suppressed by Henry the Fifth among the alien priories, but was afterwards restored by Edward the Fourth. Shortly after the dissolution of the monastic houses, the ground on which it stood was granted by Edward the Sixth to Sir Thomas Cawarden. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth the property passed into the hands of the notorious Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton-second son of the gifted and ill-fated Earl of Surrey-who, about the year 1605, erected a mansion on the spot after the designs, it is said, of Bernard Jansen and Gerard Christmas, two well-known architects in the reign of James the First. It seems not improbable, however, that the Earl had himself a share in designing the edifice, inasmuch as Lloyd informs us that he was the principal architect of his country mansion, Audley End. |