26, 1764), in his London house, which was (No. 30) at the south-east corner, where Archbishop Tenison's school now stands. Here closed in death the attentive eyes That saw the manners in the face.'1 Hogarth's house was afterwards inhabited by the Polish patriot, Thaddeus Kosciusko, and Byron's Countess Guiccioli lived in it when she visited England. In the next house (No. 28, that adjoining the Alhambra), John Hunter, the famous surgeon, first began to collect (1785) his Museum, now at the Surgeons' Hall. In No. 47, on the west side of the square, Sir Joshua Reynolds lived from 1761 to 1792. His studio is now an auction-room. ‘His study was octagonal, some twenty feet long by sixteen broad, and about fifteen feet high. The window was small and square, and the sill nine feet from the floor. His sitter's chair moved on castors, and stood above the floor about a foot and a half. He held his palettes by the handle, and the sticks of his brushes were eighteen inches long. He wrought standing, and with great celerity. He rose early, breakfasted at nine, entered his study at ten, examined designs or touched unfinished portraits till eleven brought a sitter, painted till four, then dressed, and gave the evening to company.'-Allan Cunningham, 'Lives of the Painters.' At his dinner parties there was 'cordial intercourse between persons of distinguished pretensions of all kinds, poets, physicians, lawyers, deans, historians, actors, temporal and spiritual peers, house of commons men, men of science, men of letters, painters, philosophers, musicians, and lovers of the arts-meeting on a ground of hearty ease, good-humour, and pleasantry, which exalts my respect for the memory of Reynolds. It was no prim fine table he set them down to.. Often was the dinner-board, prepared for seven or eight, required to accommodate itself to fifteen or sixteen; for often, on the very eve of dinner, would Sir Joshua tempt afternoon visitors with intimation that Johnson, or Garrick, or Goldsmith was to dine there.'- Forster's Life of Goldsmith. It was on the steps of this house that Sir Joshua one morning found the child who was painted by him in the charming picture of 'Puck,' cheered at the auction when it was sold to Rogers the poet. The mushroom and fawn's ears were added in deference to the desire of Alderman Boydell, who wished to introduce the beautiful portrait of the boy into his 'Shakespeare.' The near neighbourhood of Hogarth and Reynolds was not conducive to their harmony. Never were two great painters of the same age and country so unlike each other; and their unlikeness as artists was the result of their unlikeness as men ; their only resemblance consisting in their honesty and earnestness of purpose. It was not to be expected that they should do each other justice, and they did not. “Study the great works of the great masters for ever,” said Reynolds. “There is only one school,” cried Hogarth, "and that is kept by Nature.' What was uttered on one side of Leicester Square was pretty sure to be contradicted on the other, and neither would make the advance that might have reconciled the views of both.'-Leslie and Taylor's Life of Sir J. Reynolds. On the south of Leicester Square is the opening of St. Martin's Street-formerly St. Martin's Court, of many associations. On the left is the chapel-Orange Street Chapel-built by subscription in 1685 for the use of the French Protestants, who, after long . 1 From the epitaph by Dr. Johnson, preserved by Mrs. Piozzi. sufferings in their own country, took refuge in England on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Within its walls they prayed for the prince by whom they had been forbidden to follow their trades and professions, forbidden Christian burial and exiled, and whom yet they respected as 'the Almighty's scourge.' The adjoining house (No. 35), ugly and poverty-stricken as it looks now, was that in which Sir Isaac Newton passed some of the later years of his life, in an honoured old age, from 1720 to 1725, two years before his death at Kensington. He had been made Master of the Mint under Anne, and in 1703 became President of the Royal Society. Always frugal in his own habits, he devoted his wealth to the poor, especially to the French refugees in his neighbourhood. In the observatory on the top of his house he was wont to say that the happiest years of his life were spent. This observatory, once used as a Sunday-school, was kept up till 1824 for the inspection the foreign visitors who came by thousands to visit it, and who now, when they come to seek it, turn away disgusted at the treatment which the shrines of their illustrious dead meet with at the hands of Englishmen, for it was sold some years since to supply pews for the chapel next door. The house was afterwards inhabited by Dr. Burney, whose celebrated daughter wrote her 'Evelina' here. John Opie, the artist, who died in 1807, lived close by; and Thomas Holcroft, the novelist and dramatist, was born in St. Martin's Street in 1745, being the son of a shoemaker. Leicester Square was formerly decorated by a statue of George I., brought from the seat of the Duke of Chandos at Canons in 1747. After the square was railed in, it became a favourite place for duels, and the duel between Captain French and Captain Coote, in which the latter was killed, was fought here in 1699. In his Esmond,' Thackeray, true to his picture of the times, narrates how Lord Mohun and Lord Castlewood-having seen Mrs. Bracegirdle act, and having supped at the 'Greyhound’ at Charing Crossquarrelled, and took chairs to fight it out in Leicester Square. From the beginning of the present century Leicester Square began to decline, and gradually presented that aspect of ruin which is said to have given rise to Ledru Rollin's work on the decadence of England. In 1851 its area was leased, and its miseries were concealed by the erection of Wyld's Globe, while the neighbouring houses were given up to taverns, exhibitions of wax. works, acrobatic displays, or panoramas. After the Globe was cleared away, the area remained uncared for, and the statue perished slowly under the treatment of generations of practical jokers, till Mr. Albert Grant took pity upon the square in 1874, decorated it in the centre with a statue of Shakspeare by Fontana (a copy of that in Westminster Abbey), and at the corners with busts of four of the most famous residents-Hogarth by Durham, Newton by W. C. Marshall, Hunter by Woolner, and Reynolds by Weeks, and opened it to the public. Bear Street, Leicester Square, is named from the Bear and Ragged Staff of the Nevilles. There is still a public-house of the ‘Bear and Staff' there. From Leicester Square, Wardour Street-beloved by collectors of old furniture-leads in a direct line to Oxford Street. On the right opens Gerard Street, which derives its name from a house facing Macclesfield Street which was built by Gerard, Earl of Macclesfield, who died in 1694. In this house, which was sold for demolition in 1884, the profligate Lord Mohun lived, and hither his body was brought when he was killed in a duel by the Duke of Hamilton. In No. 43 of this street, in a house looking on the gardens of Leicester House 1—'the fifth door on the left hand coming from Newport Street,' as he wrote to his friend Elmes Steward-lived Dryden, with his wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard ; here he died, May 1, 1700, and here, if it took place at all, occurred the extraordinary scene after his death described by Johnson, with the heartless practical joke played at his funeral by Lord Jefferies. The poetused most commonly to write in the groundroom next the street.' 3 'Dryden may be properly considered as the father of English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine upon principles the merits of composition.' -Dr. Johnson. 'The matchless prose of Dryden, rich, various, natural, animated, pointed, lending itself to the logical, as well as the narrative and picturesque; never balking, never cloying, never wearying. The vigour, freedom, variety, copiousness, that speaks an exhaustless fountain from its source : nothing can surpass Dryden.'-Lord Brougham. "I may venture to say in general terms that no man hath written in our language so much, and so various matters, and in so various manners, so well. His prose had all the clearness imaginable, together with all the nobleness of expression, all the graces and ornaments proper and peculiar to it, without deviating into the language or diction of poetry. . ... His versification and his numbers he could learn of nobody, for he first possessed those talents in perfection in our own tongue; and they who have succeeded in them since his time have been indebted to his example; and the more they have been able to imitate him, the better they have succeeded.'-Congreve. A noble staircase remains in No. 34 Gerard Street. Edmund Burke was living No. 37 (now the Hôtel de Versailles) at the time of the trial of Warren Hastings, and at the Turk's Head' in this street he united with Johnson and Reynolds in 1764 in founding the ‘Literary Club,' to which the clever men of the day usually thought it the greatest honour to belong. 4 ““I believe Mr. Fox will allow me to say,” remarked the Bishop of St. Asaph, "that the honour of being elected into the Turk's Head Club is not inferior to that of being the representative of Westminster or Surrey."'-Forster. It was to this society that Goldsmith was admitted by the friendship of Johnson, before his more important works were published, but came unwillingly, feeling that he sacrificed something for the sake of good company, and shut himself out of several places where 1 Dedication of Don Sebastian to the Earl of Leicester. 2 Lives of the Poets, vol. i. 3 Pope, in Spence's Anecdotes. 4 The club still exists, but is called the Johnson.' he 'used to play. the fool very agreeably;' and here he would entertain and astonish literary supper parties with his favourite song about 'an old woman tossed in a blanket seventeen times as high as the moon.' At the corner of Wardour Street (here formerly Prince's Street) and Richmond Street was a house--pulled down June 1885—which was believed to have been inhabited by Nell Gwynne. Macclesfield Street leads into Dean Street, which contains the Church of St. Anne's, Soho, consecrated by Bishop Compton in 1686, and dedicated to the mother of the Virgin out of compliment to the Princess Anne : its tower is said to have been made as Danish as possible to flatter her Danish husband. Against the outer wall is a tablet erected by Horace Walpole, and with the inscription, also by him *Near this place is interred Theodore, King of Corsica, who died in this parish, Dec. 11, 1756, immediately after leaving the King's Bench Prison by the benefit of the Act of Insolvency, in consequence of which he registered his kingdom of Corsica for the use of his creditors. The grave, great teacher, to a level brings This unfortunate king was a Prussian-Stephen Theodore, Baron von Neuhoff. While in the service of Charles XII. of Sweden, the protection which he afforded to the inhabitants of Corsica induced them in 1736 to offer him their crown. He ruled disinterestedly, but the embarrassments to which he was reduced by want of funds for the payment of his army forced him to come to seek them in London, where he was arrested for debt. Horace Walpole tried to raise a subscription for him, but only fifty pounds were obtainable. In Voltaire's 'Candide' Theodore tells his story : "Je suis Théodore; on m'a élu roi en Corse; on m'a appelé votre majesté ; et à présent à peine m'appelle-t-on monsieur ; j'ai fait frapper de la monnaie, et je ne possède pas un denier; j'ai eu deux secrétaires d'état, et j'ai à peine un valet; je me suis vu sur un trône, et j'ai longtemps été à Londres en prison sur la paille.'--Ch. xxvi. 'King Theodore recovered his liberty only by giving up his effects to his creditors under the Act of Insolvency; all the effects, however, that he had to give up were his right, such as it was, to the throne of Corsica, which was registered accordingly in due form for the benefit of his creditors. As soon as Theodore was set at liberty, he took a chair and went to the Portuguese minister; but not finding him at home, and not having a sixpence to pay, he desired the chairmen to carry him to a tailor in Soho, whom he prevailed upon to harbour him; but he fell sick the next day, and died in three more.'-Horace Walpole. The man who allowed King Theodore to die in his house was too poor to pay for his funeral, and the expense was undertaken by John Wright, an oilman in Compton Street, who said that he was willing for once to pay the funeral expenses of a king.' One of the first seat - holders in the church was Catherine Sedley, mistress of James II. In the vault beneath is buried Lord Camelford, killed in a duel at Kensington in 1804. William Hazlitt the essayist (1830) rests in the churchyard.1 'In critical disquisitions on the leading characters and works of the drama, he is not surpassed in the whole range of English literature.'--Sir A. Alison's Hist. of Europe. The brick wall of St. Anne's Churchyard may recall the familiar figure of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who bought there—from a collection of ballads hanging against the wall—a rude woodcut, the chiaro oscuro of which he used in his picture of Lord Ligonier on horseback. The churchyard was opened June 1892 as a public garden. From the north-east corner of Leicester Square, Cranbourne Street, so called from the second title of the Cecils, leads into Long Acre, which as far back as 1695 was the especial domain of coach-builders. It derives its name from a narrow strip of ground 1 His tombstone has been moved from his grave, and stuck against the wall, near that of King Theodore. |