Religious houses, and charitable foundations connected with them, were going by the mast just then in England; and St. James's Hospital, combining the principal features of both, went with the rest. Some say that Henry VIII. sacrilegiously seized upon the establishment, and appropriated its revenues, amounting to no less than a clear £1,000 a year, to his own use. But at a time when all similar endowments were being absorbed by the State, a rich sisterhood, whose domicile was separated only by a dead flat of marshy fields from the royal residence, could hardly have hoped to escape. Their fate was inevitable. Besides, the character of the establishment had under

gone a complete revolution. It no longer fulfilled the object for which it was instituted, the sanitary necessity having ceased. The malady, which had been introduced into Europe at the period of the Crusades, had disappeared before the end of the fifteenth century, so that the sisterhood who inherited the benefits of the foundation in the subsequent cycle represented not leprosy, but the tradition of it. Under such circumstances, the taint having died out, their lives may be presumed to have been passed in the serenest condition of enjoyment. They were comfortably housed, and plenteously, if not daintily, provided, well cared for in mundane things, assiduously prayed for in things spiritual, and as happy as birds all day long, with the sweet bells of the sanctuary ringing them, from morning till night, to offices of grace and thanksgiving. To be sure Henry stopped the bells, and put an end to the luxury; but to his credit be it added that, instead of sending the sisters out to beg on the highway, he royally compounded with them for their life interest in the charity, and pensioned them off. Having thus fairly got the hospital into his own hands, he demolished the building, and reared in its place a noble Manor House, turning the swampy fields into a Park, surrounded by a high brick wall, embracing the whole extent of the interval to Whitehall.

The transition is striking from the sick nuns of St. James's to their successors. No two modes of existence present a more surprising contrast. The dim cells and narrow passages, the dark refectory, the miniature chapel, and the stillness that brooded over the whole, were displaced by gay chambers, picture-galleries, mazy stairs leading in and out of secret places, and a hubbub of soldiers and courtiers and fine ladies trooping about at all hours, with a great clamour of drums and trumpets, heralds, knights and tilting, and crowds of idle people coming to gaze upon the glitter of the Court.

Henry, at the date of this transformation, was at the height of his passion for Anne Boleyn, and in the year in which the work was finished he married her. The Palace was probably expressly intended for her residence, and the first guests it received were His Majesty and his new bride.

The Park was filled with game, and strictly preserved. In Elizabeth's ime, an inscription in verse over the entrance from Whitehall abounded in conceits about Acteon and Diana; and deer sported on its sward even so late

as the reign of Charles II. In Henry's time the Park formed a pleasaunce to the two palaces, and, curiously enough, Anne Boleyn is linked with the history of both; for she was privately married in a garret of the palace of Whitehall, and then removed across the secluded grounds to take up her residence at St. James's. Everybody knows the tragedy that followed, and how brief a space elapsed between the booming of the cannon that proclaimed her nuptials, and the tolling of the muffled bell that announced her execution. While she was undergoing that piteous death at the Tower, the king, to show his satisfaction or indifference, ostentatiously dressed himself in white, and the next morning married Jane Seymour.

From that period, as if, indeed, royalty shuddered at the thought of inhabiting apartments that recalled such terrible memories, the Palace of St. James's was used only as a sort of palace of ease to Whitehall, until the Stuarts came in, when James I. bestowed it upon Prince Henry, who was created Prince of Wales, with a household of upwards of four hundred persons. Who can say what different channels our domestic history might have run in had that prince lived? But the doom that was impending over the dynasty betrayed signs even thus early. The King and his son never agreed; their tempers sowed discords between them; and when the Prince died, at the premature age of nineteen, his father, carrying resentment beyond the grave, prohibited the court from going into mourning. A royal burial, however, took place at Westminster. The costly funeral procession which issued from the gate of St. James's on that occasion was followed, at no very distant interval, by a procession of another kind, in which the pall, anticipating the stroke of death, was hung upon the living. It was in the bleak month of January that Charles I. was removed from Windsor to the palace of St. James's to take his trial. He was brought to town so unexpectedly, that his master of the wardrobe had scarcely time to prepare his apartment in the palace. But there was little need. He had only eleven days to live, and in that brief term he had not much leisure to think about satin hangings, velvet couches, and looking-glasses.

If we could suppose that Charles II., who was born in St. James's, and whose memories of it must have been embittered by painful comparisons, was capable of being touched deeply by the misfortunes of his family, we should be furnished at once with an explanation of his reason for abandoning the old pile, and living at Whitehall; but as we find him. daily abroad in the park, which he has marvellously improved, lounging under Nell Gwynn's windows, close to the palace walls, and perpetually haunting the adjoining courts and passages, dropping into the stables, and exploring the chambers, with some dim design, probably, of doing something which something else is always putting out of his head, we cannot give him credit for being very sensitive about old associations. He prefers Whitehall simply because it answers his purposes better. It is more spacious and gorgeous. There are plenty of rooms in it, perplexingly situated, for the ladies of honour, and no end to "practicable doors" for the high comedy

of the Jennings, the Prices, the Stuarts, the Hobarts, and the Temples; with luxurious accommodation besides for the Castlemaines and Portsmouths, who are as independent of each other as if they dwelt in separate pavilions, with canopied balconies looking out over gardens trimmed by the pictorial hand of Verrio. Not a thought about the scene which took place up there on the scaffold out of the windows a few years ago, nor a warning of the scene that is to take place a few years hence in that "glorious gallery," thrilling with music, and cards, and French songs, and voluptuous dalliance on the Sunday night; then a suspicion of poison, and in a week "all is dust," and the heralds are proclaiming James II. at Whitehall Gate, and the conduits are again running with wine, just as they did when King Charles, with a red feather in his hat, and the Duke of York by his side, made his entry into London, followed by so mighty a cavalcade that it took seven hours to pass under the arch of Temple Bar.

James was fond of the palace that bore his saint's name. He had resided in it after the Restoration, and he regarded it also with interest as the scene of a memorable incident that befell him in his boyhood. Having been made prisoner in the civil war, and kept under surveillance here, he ingeniously effected his escape, not in the disguise of a footman, as his father had done from Oxford a year or two before, but by a more legitimate dramatic expedient. He and his brother and sister, and other young people in the palace, were in the habit of playing at hide-and-seek at night after supper; and he used to outstrip all his playfellows in the skill with which he would hide in such secret places as to baffle discovery. All this was premeditated, so that no particular surprise should be excited when at last they went to search for him, and could not find him. One night, instead of hiding. himself as usual, he made his way down the back-stairs into the garden, and from thence, by means of a key with which he had provided himself, into the park. A cloak and a periwig, supplied by a servant in waiting outside, enabled him to continue his flight without detection to Spring Gardens, where a gentleman, bearing the appropriate name of Tripp, was ready with a hackney coach. The next news heard of the little duke announced his safe arrival in Holland.

The last Stuart birth that took place in the palace was that of the Prince Frederic Francis Edward, better known as the Pretender, exalted to heaven in the heroic couplets of Dryden, and stigmatised in a thousand lampoons as an impostor conveyed to the royal chamber under the lid of a warming-pan. Speedily followed another slide of the lantern, when the Prince of Orange appeared upon the scene, and received the congratulations of the people in the very chamber where, only a few hours before, James had eaten a hasty dinner, over which a Roman Catholic priest had pronounced a benediction.

William bestowed the palace upon the Princess Anne, who afterwards became Queen, and her husband, Prince George of Denmark, the est-il possible of the only joke his banished father-in-law was ever known to have

made. Then came the burning of Whitehall; and then followed the reign of Anne, when St. James's became the permanent town residence of the sovereign, and so continued till the time of George III., who removed, upon a grant from Parliament, to Buckingham House, so called after its founder, Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, a man of great vanity and small parts. From that time to the present the old palace has been used only for State purposes.

The Court of the early Georges, although marked by external decorum and formality, was by no means free from secret vices. Here ladies were lodged as they had formerly been at Whitehall, only less ostentatiously, while the dulness that prevailed in the interior went a great way to mitigate the scandal. The results, however, were much the same. The fat Countess of Darlington, or the lean Duchess of Kendal, with whom there was some talk of a left-handed marriage, may not in all respects pair off with the Portsmouths or the Clevelands, but the balance on the side of public morality is hardly perceptible; and the biography of Mrs. Howard, or the miserable story of Miss Vane, might have furnished copious materials for the draggled muse of Rochester.

son

The feud between James I. and the Prince of Wales seems to have been transmitted to the kings of the Georgian era and their eldest sons. George I. entertained so fierce a feeling of jealousy and anger against his -afterwards George II.-that he turned him and his household out of the palace at a moment's notice. They had so little time for preparation, that the Prince and Princess were obliged to take refuge in the house of their Chamberlain, until a residence could be provided for them. The street ballads made merry with this vulgar quarrel in the Royal family; describing the Prince's retinue as snatching up whatever they could put their hands on, and the maids of honour, the Bellendens, Howards, and Lepels, with whose wit and charms Pope has made all the world acquainted, going about laughing, or jeering, or singing snatches of "Over the hills, and far away." Matters were still worse between George II. and his son' Frederick, who kept an opposition Court at Leicester House; and George III. was so entirely estranged from his son, afterwards George IV., that when the Prince went to the palace to express his condolence after His Majesty's life had been attempted by Margaret Nicholson, the King refused to see him.

omens.

George IV. was born in St. James's Palace, in the midst of good It was the anniversary of the accession of his family to the throne; and at the moment of his birth-or, according to some scrupulous authorities, a few moments before-a waggon laden with gold, the spoils of a Spanish ship captured by an English frigate, passed under the windows of the Palace on its way to the Mint. At twelve months old the Prince was shown to the public from the same windows; at three years old he received a deputation of Ancient Britons, and responded to their Address in a little sentence, which he is said to have delivered with

precision; and when he was seven years old a Drawing Room was held in his name.

William IV. was the last of our sovereigns born here; but in the carly part of his life his profession carried him into other scenes, and in his latter years his name was associated with the palace only in reference to public ceremonials and State festivities.

All these people have passed away-the hospital nuns and the palace beauties, the kings and priests, poets, politicians and courtiers. Even of the old Palace nothing remains, except the Presence Chamber, which successive Sovereigns have somewhat tampered with, and the gateway and towers facing St. James's Street, which are preserved in their integrity. Another, and a wiser age, has opened to us, and if we could fill the Park again with the figures that once flitted through its devious walks, it would not be half so interesting a sight as that of the streams of pedestrians that now roll through it all day long. A peep amongst the wits at Lockett's, or the maids of honour masked in the bowers of the Mulberry Garden; Cromwell jolting in a sedan, or Charles whispering over the wall to Nelly ; Swift repeating to some fine lady of the Court his eternal joke about the cure for a toothache, or his great pun on a hare; Richardson seated under a tree meditating a sequel to "Pamela;" Bub Dodington ogling a window in the Mall, where he pretends to see a pretty face; Bolingbroke reading a passage out of the "Craftsman" to Pulteney; or Walpole passing Chesterfield, whom he knows to be his enemy, with that lambent smile upon his face which even his friends shrank from;-all these, and five hundred celebrities more who might easily be gathered into the panorama, would form a less attractive picture than the open Park, in the reign of Queen Victoria, receiving incessant contributions of passengers at all hours from the vast hives of population by which it is surrounded.

And the Palace, too, has advanced with the moral and educational progress of the age, and become the pattern of the purest domestic life in the country. There is no longer a whisper of scandal in the corridor, and the odious compound "back-stairs" has dropped out of the language. The children of royalty, no longer trained up in an artificial climate, and kept apart from the people, are brought out into the world to obtain. experience where alone it can be obtained, and to fit themselves for government by mixing amongst men.

Health and long life to the judicious Mother and beloved Queen, endeared to her subjects by the integrity of her principles and the soundness of her judgment! It will be for historians years hence-may they be far distant!-to delineate a character to which contemporary writers cannot do justice without appearing to run into exaggeration.

ROBERT BELL.