Holland House.] DEATH OF LORD HOLLAND. which were preserved the features of the best and wisest Englishmen of two generations. They will recollect how many men who have guided the politics of Europe, who have moved great assemblies by reason and eloquence, who have put life into bronze or canvas, or who have left to posterity things so written that society will not willingly let them die, were there mixed with all that was lovely and gayest in the society of the most splendid of modern capitals. They will remember the singular character, too, which belonged to that circle; in which every talent and accomplishment, every art and science, had its place. They will remember how the last Parliamentary debate was discussed in one corner, and the last comedy of Scribe in another; while Wilkie gazed in admiration on Reynolds's 'Baretti;' while Mackintosh turned over Thomas Aquinas to verify a quotation; while Talleyrand related his conversation with Barras at the Luxembourg, or his ride with Lannes over the field of Austerlitz. They will remember, above all, the grace and the kindness-far more admirable than grace-with which the princely hospitality of that ancient mansion was dispensed; they will remember the venerable and benignant countenance of him who bade them welcome there; they will remember that temper which thirty years of sickness, of lameness, and of confinement served only to make sweeter; and, above all, that frank politeness which at once relieved all the embarrassment of the most timid author or artist who found himself for the first time among ambassadors and earls. They will remember, finally, that in the last lines which he traced he expressed his joy that he had done nothing unworthy of the friend of Fox and of Grey; and they will have reason to feel a similar joy if, in looking back on many troubled years of life, they cannot accuse themselves of having done anything unworthy of men who were honoured by the friendship of Lord Holland." Mr. Rush, in his “Court of London," tells us a good story of a little incident which happened in the drawing-room here after dinner. Advancing towards Sir Philip Francis, Mr. Rogers asked permission to put a question to him. Francis, no doubt, guessed what was coming, for everybody at the time was asking, "Who is Junius?" and many persons were even then more than disposed to identify him with the author of the "Letters "which were published under that signature, and were exciting the nation. Francis, who was an irritable man, shut him fairly up with the words, "At your peril, sir!" On this, Rogers quietly turned away, observing that if Francis was not "Junius," at all 173 events he was "Brutus." It is not a little singular, if the letters were not written by Francis, that they ceased to appear after the very day on which Francis quitted the shores of England for India, and that Garrick, who was in the secret, prophesied a day or two before that they were about to cease. On the death of his uncle, Charles James Fox, Lord Holland was introduced into the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal; but the strength of the Whig portion of the Government had then departed, and the only measure worthy of notice in which his lordship co-operated after his accession to office was the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. He took an active part in the multifarious debates upon the Catholic question, the Regency Bill, &c.; and when the Bill to legalise the detention of Napoleon as a prisoner of war was before the House of Lords, Lord Holland raised his voice against it, and, until death relieved the prisoner, he never ceased to deprecate what he deemed the unwarrantable conduct towards him of the British Government and its agents. Lord Holland died in October, 1840, after an illness of only two days' duration. Mr. T. Raikes, in notifying the occurrence in his "Diary," remarks: -"Flahault had been staying at Holland House while he was in England, and left him in good health on Tuesday. He arrived here yesterday morning, and to-day receives the account of his death. Lord Holland was in the Cabinet, and held the lucrative post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; he was sixty-seven. When I went to Eton he was the head of the school, and was the first prepositor that gave me my liberty. He was a mild, amiable man, ruled by his wife. She was a Miss Vassall, with a large fortune, who eloped with him from her first husband, Sir Godfrey Webster; she is a great politician, and affects the esprit fort. They kept a hospitable house, and received all the wits of the day." The following lines were written by Lord Holland on the morning of the day when his last illness commenced, and were found after his death on his dressing-room table : "Nephew of Fox and friend of Grey, If those who knew me best shall say Mr. Raikes also adds:-" Mrs. Damer writes me that the new Lord Holland inherits an estate of £6,000 per annum, on which there is an enormous debt. Holland House is left to Lady Holland, who will not live there." "Lord Holland," says Mr. Peter Cunningham, "called on Lord Lansdowne a little before his death, and showed him his epitaph of his own composing. Here lies Henry Vassall Fox, Lord Holland, &c., who was drowned while sitting in his elbow-chair.' He died in this house, in his elbow-chair, of water in the chest." The following is a character of Lord Holland, written by a friend :-" The benignant, the accomplished Lord Holland is no more; the last and best of the Whigs of the old school, the long-tried friend of civil and religious liberty, has closed a life which to have a hearing for every argument, lest a truth should be shut out from his mind. The charm of his conversation will never be forgotten by those who have enjoyed it. His mind was full of anecdote, which was always introduced with the most felicitous appositeness, and exquisitely narrated. "Lord Holland had lived with all the most distinguished and eminent men of the last forty years; but his knowledge of the greatest, the most eloquent, cause. has been an ornament and a bulwark of the Liberal He was one of England's worthies in the pristine sense of the word; and a more finished example of the steady statesman, the urbane gentleman, and the accomplished scholar, never existed. Lord Holland's was a fine mind, and a fine mind in perpetual exercise of the most healthful kind. It was observed of him that he was never found without a good book in his hand. His understanding was thoroughly masculine, his taste of a delicacy approaching perhaps to a fault. His opinions he maintained earnestly and energetically, but with a rare, a beautiful candour. Nothing was proscribed with him. As of old, the meanest wayfarers used to be received hospitably, lest angels should be turned away; so Lord Holland seemed the most witty, or the most learned, had not indisposed him to appreciate merits and talents of a less great order. He was a friend of merit wherever it could be found, and knew how to value and to encourage it in all its degrees. "None ever enjoyed life more than Lord Holland, or enjoyed it more intellectually, and none contritributed more largely to the enjoyment of others. He possessed the sunshine of the breast, and no one could approach him without feeling its genial influence. Lord Holland was a wit, without a particle of ill nature, and a man of learning, without a taint of pedantry. His apprehension of anything good was unfailing; nothing worth observing and remarking ever escaped him. The void which Lord Holland has left will never be filled; a golden Lord Holland was succeeded in his title and estates by his only son, Henry Edward, who was some time the British Minister at the Court of Tuscany. He died at Naples in 1859, when the barony became extinct. From that time, down to the year 1874, it was always a matter of apprehension that a day would sooner or later come when, as prophesied by Sir Walter Scott, Holland House must become a thing of the past, and be swept away in order to make room for new lines of keeping the mansion in its integrity. Lord Ilchester's name is Fox-Strangways, and it is the latter name that has been assumed by his branch of the family, the first Lord Holland and the first Lord Ilchester, as stated above, having been brothers. Lord Macaulay, in writing of Holland House, says it "can boast of a greater number of inmates distinguished in political and literary history than any other private dwelling in England." In the lifetime of the third Lord Holland it was the meeting With the death of the third Lord Holland, the glories of Holland House may be said to have passed away, although the building has been occupied as an occasional residence by the widow of the last lord since his death in 1859; and an air of solitude seems indeed to have gathered round the old mansion. A custom was observed for many years, till a recent date, of firing off a cannon at eleven o'clock every night; this custom originated, we believe, through a burglary which was once attempted here. 66 place of the Whig party; and his liberal hospitality Lord Holland set up an "expiatory classical altar,” made it, as Lord Brougham tells us, "the resort which, however, was removed a few years ago. not only of the most interesting persons composing With the passion for eccentricity which had English society, literary, philosophical, and political, characterised him, Lord Camelford had directed but also to all belonging to those classes who ever that he should be buried in a lonely spot on an visited this country from abroad.” island in Switzerland, which had interested him during his travels; his wishes, however, were not complied with, for his body was interred in the vaults of St. Anne's Church, Soho, where it still remains.* "This very spot," the Princess Marie Lichstenstein tells us, was, a few years ago, the scene of merry parties, where the Duke and Duchess d'Aumale used to fish with the late Lord Holland." At the back of the mansion is a broad expanse of greensward, dotted here and there with stately elms; and here, in an alcove facing the west, is inscribed the couplet that we have given as a motto to this chapter, and which was put up by the late Lord Holland in honour of Mr. Rogers. Here is also a copy of verses by Mr. Luttrell, expressing his inability to emulate the poet. The undulating grounds on this side of the house are terminated by a row of mansions built on the fringe of the estate; and the eastern side is bounded by a rustic lane, in part overhung with trees. Close by the western side of the house are small gardens, laid out in both the ancient and modern styles, the work of the late Lady Holland, the former of them being a fitting accompaniment to the old house. Here are evergreens clipped into all sorts of fantastic forms, together with fountains and terraces befitting the associations of the place. In one of these gardens, says Leigh Hunt, was raised the first specimen of the dahlia, which the late Lord Holland is understood to have brought from Spain; in another, on a pedestal, is a colossal bust of Napoleon, by a pupil of Canova. Engraved on the pedestal is a quotation from Homer's "Odyssey," which may be thus rendered in English: * Several spots in the grounds round the house have acquired celebrity in connection with some name or circumstance. Of these we may note the part lying to the west, towards the Addison Road, which formerly went by the name of "the Moats," where the duel between Captain Best and the notorious Lord Camelford took place, early in the present century. The exact spot is supposed to have been the site of the older mansion belonging to the De Veres. The quarrel between Lord Camelford and Mr. Best, of which we have spoken in our accounts of New Bond Street and Conduit Street, was on account of a friend of Lord Camelford, a lady of the name of Symons, and it occurred at the "Prince of Wales's " coffee-house in Conduit Street. The duel was fought on the following day (March 7, 1804), and Lord Camelford was killed. Although there really was no adequate cause for a quarrel, the eccentric nobleman would persist in fighting Mr. Best, because the latter was deemed the best shot in England, and that "to have made an apology would have exposed his lordship's courage to suspicion." The parties met on the ground about eight o'clock in the morning, and having taken up their position, Lord Camelford gave the first shot, which missed his antagonist, when Mr. Best fired, and lodged the contents of his weapon in his lordship's body. He immediately fell, and calling his adversary to him, seized him by the hand, and exclaimed, “I am a dead man you have killed me; but I freely forgive you." He repeated several times that he was the sole aggressor. He was conveyed to a house close at hand, and a surgeon soon arrived from Kensington, and immediately pronounced the wound mortal. Upon the spot where the duel was fought the late See Vol. IV., pp. 302, 323. ! "The hero is not dead, but breathes the air Harsh men the prisoner keep." The Highland and Scottish Societies' gatherings, with their characteristic sports and pastimes, were held in these grounds for many years. The grounds around the house are rich in oaks, plane-trees, and stately cedars, whose dark foliage sets off the features of the old mansion. Of the grounds in front of the house, there is a tradition that Cromwell and Ireton conferred there, as a place in which they could not be overheard.” Leigh Hunt, in his "Old Court Suburb," observes See Vol. III., p. 182, Notting Hill.] LITTLE HOLLAND HOUSE. 177 that, "whatever the subject of their conference time M.P. for Stroud, and Secretary to the may have been, they could not have objected to Ordnance Board, who married Lady Mary Fitzbeing seen, for there were neither walls, nor even clarence. The grounds, however, were sold in trees, we believe, at that time in front of the house, 1875 for building purposes, and the house was as there are now; and," he adds, "we may fancy soon after pulled down. royalists riding by, on their road to Brentford, where the king's forces were defeated, and trembling to see the two grim republicans laying their heads together." Near Holland House, in Nightingale Lane, stands a small mansion, called Little Holland House, where Mrs. Inchbald once spent a few days with its occupant, a Mrs. Bubb; here, too, lived and died Miss Fox, sister of the late Lord Holland. Facing the Uxbridge Road at the extreme end, at the north-west corner of the grounds of Holland House, there was a smaller mansion, with a "pleasaunce" garden and lawn, of about seven acres, which for many years was owned and tenanted by a natural son of Lord HollandGeneral Fox, the celebrated numismatist, some At the western extremity of the parish of Kensington, on the road towards Hammersmith, were the nursery-grounds of Messrs. Lee. These grounds, says Leigh Hunt, "have been known in the parish books, under the title of the Vineyard, ever since the time of William the Conqueror. Wine, described as a sort of burgundy, was actually made and sold in them as late as the middle of the last century. James Lee, the founder of the present firm who own the grounds, was the author of one of the earliest treatises on botany, and a correspondent of Linnæus." In Faulkner's "History of Kensington," published in 1820, we read that the nursery-grounds round this neighbourhood covered no less than 124 acres, and that they belonged to eight different proprietors. CHAPTER XV. NOTTING HILL AND BAYSWATER. The Old Turnpike Gate-Derivation of the Name of Notting Hill-The Manor of Notting or Nutting Barns-Present Aspect of Notting Hill-Old Inns and Taverns-Gallows Close-The Road where Lord Holland drew up his Forces previous to the Battle of Brentford-Kensington Gravel Pits-Tradesmen's Tokens-A Favourite Locality for Artists and Laundresses-Appearance of the District at the Beginning of the Present Century-Reservoirs of the Grand Junction Waterworks Company-Ladbroke Square and Grove-Kensington Park Gardens-St John's Church-Notting Hill Farm-Norland Square-Orme Square-Bayswater House, the Residence of Fauntleroy, the Forger-St. Petersburgh Place―The Hippodrome-St. Stephen's Church-Portobello Farm-The Convent of the Little Sisters of the Poor-Bayswater-The Cultivation of Watercresses-An Ancient Conduit-Public Tea Gardens-Sir John Hill, the Botanist-Craven House-Craven Road, and Craven Hill Gardens-The Pest-house Fields-Upton Farm--The Toxophilite Society-Westbourne Grove and Terrace-The Residence of John Sadleir, the Fraudulent M.P.-Lancaster Gate-The Pioneer of Tramways-Queen Charlotte's Lying-in Hospital-Death of Dr. Adam Clarke-The Burial-ground of St. George's, Hanover Square. the shepherds, and the nightingales which, so lately as the reign of William IV., sang sweetly here in the summer nights, are now, each and all, things of the past. As soon as ever we quit the precincts of Ken- | and Westbourne Grove! We fear that the nuts, and sington proper, and cross the Uxbridge Road, we become painfully conscious of a change. We have left the "Old Court Suburb," and find ourselves in one that is neither "old" nor 66 court-like." The roadway, with its small shops on either side, is narrow and unattractive, and the dwellings are not old enough to have a history or to afford shelter for an anecdote. About the centre of this thoroughfare, at the spot whence omnibuses are continually starting on the journey eastward towards the City, stood, till about the year 1860, a small and rather picturesque turnpike-gate, which commanded not only the road towards Notting Hill and Shepherd's Bush, but also that which branches off to the north and north-east in the direction of the Grove of Westbourne. What rural ideas and pictures arise before our mental eye as we mention Notting -possibly Nutting-Hill, and the Shepherd's Bush Notting Hill is said to derive its name from a manor in Kensington called "Knotting-Bernes," or "Knutting-Barnes," sometimes written "Notting," or "Nutting-barns "—so, at least, writes Lysons, in his "Environs of London." He adds that the property belonged formerly to the De Veres, Earls of Oxford (which would naturally be the case, as it formed part of Kensington parish and manor); and subsequently to Lord Burleigh, who, as we have already seen, lived at Brompton Hall, not very far from the neighbourhood of Kensington. In Robins' " History of Paddington," we read that the "manor of Noting barons, alias Kensington, then 'Nutting Barns,' afterwards called |