also of the Haymarket about Piqudillo." An Act passed the 13th Charles II. (1662) made provision for the pavement of Pall Mall, the Haymarket, and St. James's Street. Building was going rapidly forward on the space encompassed by these three streets, under the auspices of the Earl of St. Alban's. Pepys has this entry in his Diary' on the 1st of April, 1666 :-" Up and down my Lord St. Alban his new building and market-house, looking too and again into every place building :" and under the date 2nd September, 1663, he remarks, 'My Lord Mayor told me the bringing of water to the city hath cost, at first and last, above 300,000l.; but by the new building and the building of St. James's by my Lord St. Alban's (which is now about, and which the City stomach, I perceive, highly, but dare not oppose it), were it now to be done it would not be done for a million of money." Jermyn Street, St. Alban Street, and St. James's Square were far advanced; but the Park and Palace were the suns to which they turned their faces. Piccadilly and Portugal Street was merely a road behind them—the highway to the Haymarket. This feeling is expressed in the superior ornament bestowed by Wren upon "the handsome door of the Ionic order, with bold masculine trusses and entablature, next Jermyn Street." The Piccadilly line of road formed at its east end the line of demarcation between the courtly mansions erecting in St. James's Fields and " the small and mean habitations, which will prove only receptacles for the poorer sort and the offensive trades, to the annoyance of the better inhabitants; the damage of the parishes, already too much burdened with poor; the choking up the air of his Majesty's palace and park and the houses of the nobility; the infecting of the waters, &c. &c.;" of which Wren complained in a petition to the king in 1671, as "contrived and erected in Dogs' Fields, Windmill Fields, and the fields adjoining So-ho."

To the north-west, however, we emerge into pleasant fields upon which the nobility and gentry had already erected mansions: more were erecting, some destined only to an ephemeral existence, some of which still survive. Evelyn and Pepys furnish us with some peeps into their interiors that throw light on the manners of their time, and have some not unedifying associations attached to them.

The present Arlington Street occupies the space once taken up by the gardens of Goring House. An entry in Evelyn's 'Diary' enables us to form a conjecture both as to the appearance of the mansion and the view from it; for it seems pro bable that the remark about the decoy must have been suggested by its being seen from the house or grounds:-" 29th March, 1665. Went to Goring House, now Mr. Secretary Bennett's; ill-built, but the place capable of being made a pretty villa. His Majesty was now finishing the decoy in the park." This entry also indicates the period at which Lord Arlington took possession: it was occupied by him till the period of its destruction by fire, also recorded by Evelyn:—“ 21st November, 1674. Went to see the great loss that Lord Arlington had sustained by fire at Goring House, this night consumed to the ground, with exceeding loss of hangings, plate, rare pictures, and cabinets; hardly anything was saved of the best and most princely furniture that any subject had in England. My Lord and Lady were both absent at Bath." The same author gives us an account of part of this "most princely furniture," while mentioning a visit he

paid to the Countess in April, 1673:-" I carried Lady Tuke to thank the Countess of Arlington for speaking to his Majesty on her behalf for being one of the Queen Consort's women. She carried us up into her new dressing-room at Goring House, where was a bed, two glasses, silver jars and vases, cabinets, and other so rich furniture as I had seldom seen: to this excess of superfluity were we now arrived, and that not only at court, but universally, even to profusion." To Pepys we are indebted for the information that a sister of Milton's Hartlib (everybody's Hartlib) was married at Goring House:-" 10th July, 1660. Home, and called my wife, and took her to Clodins's to a great wedding of Nan Hartlib to Mynheer Roder, which was kept at Goring House with very great state, cost, and noble company." The same gossip has left us a picture of himself standing amid the gaping crowd which waited to see the new Chancellor issue from Goring House when the seals were taken from Clarendon:- 31st August, 1667. At the office in the morning, where by Sir W. Penn I do hear that the seal was fetched away to the King yesterday by Secretary Morrice, which puts me in a great horror. In the evening Mr. Ball of the Excise Office tells me that the seal is delivered to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, the man of the whole nation that is the best spoken of and will please most people; and therefore I am mighty glad of it. He was then at my Lord Arlington's, whither I went, expecting to see him come out; but stayed so long, and Sir William Coventry coming there, whom I had not a mind should see me there idle upon a post night, I went home without seeing him; but he is there with his seal in his hand.” Roger North, in his Life of his brother, Sir Dudley, has an allusion to the process by which the villa-ground was transformed into a street. "When he came first to England," says Roger, "all things were new to him, and he had an infinite pleasure in going about to see the considerable places and buildings about town. I, like an old dame with a young damsel, by conducting him, had the pleasure of seeing them over again myself." St. Paul's, then building, was his ordinary walk; and much did he speculate on the pressure of arches;—à propos of which inquiries, we are informed—“ But not only at St. Paul's, but at many other places, he had the like diversion; for wherever there was a parcel of building going on, he went to survey it, and particularly the high buildings in Arlington Street, which were scarce covered in before all the windows were wry-mouthed, the fascias turned SS, and divers stacks of chimneys sunk right down, drawing roof and floors with them." Sir Dudley returned from Constantinople to England in 1680, and died in December, 1691: the erection of the “high buildings" in Arlington Street must therefore fall in the interval between these two years.

In 1665 three villas were begun to be built on the opposite side of the way from Goring House, as we learn from Pepys :-" 20th February, 1664-5. Rode into the beginning of my Lord Chancellor's new house, near St. James's, which common people have already called Dunkirk House, from their opinion of his having a good bribe for the selling of that town: and very noble I believe it will be. Near that is my Lord Barkeley beginning another on one side, and Sir J. Denham on the other."

If we are to understand that the grounds belonging to Berkeley, Clarendon, and Burlington Houses, occupied the whole space on the north side of Piccadilly,

where these mansions were erected, the grounds attached to Clarendon House must have extended on the east to Burlington Arcade; for that, as appears from the Act of Parliament by which the district appertaining to St. James's Church was erected into a parish, was the western boundary of the Earl of Burlington's possessions. On the west the grant of land made by the Crown to Lord Clarendon seems to have extended to where the Three Kings livery-stable yard now is, at the entrance into which may be seen two pillars, with Corinthian capitals, according to D'Israeli the only surviving relics of Clarendon House. The Chancellor began to build here (as we learn from Evelyn's Diary') in the course of the year 1664,"encouraged thereto," as he has left on record in his memorial of his own life," by the royal grant of land, by the opportunity of purchasing the stones which had been designed for the repairs of St. Paul's, and by that passion for building to which he was naturally too much inclined." It remained in Lord Clarendon's possession till his flight after he had been deprived of the great seal; and was for a time occupied by his son, who sold it to the second Duke of Albemarle, by whom it was ultimately disposed of to a company of building speculators. Evelyn and Pepys furnish us with some graphic representations of the varying fortunes of this magnificent pile during its brief existence.

*

"After dinner," writes Evelyn on the 15th of October, 1664, "my Lord Chancellor and his Lady carried me in their coach to see their palace now building at the upper end of St. James's Street, and to project the garden." Pepys has an entry under the date of the 31st January, 1665-6-"To my Lord Chancellor's new house, which he is building, only to view it, hearing so much from Mr. Evelyn of it; and indeed it is the finest pile I ever did see in my life, and will be a glorious house." On the 28th of December in the same year Evelyn has noted" Went to see Clarendon House, now almost finished, a goodly house to see to, placed most gracefully." On the 20th of January, 1665-6, Evelyn wrote to Lord Cornbury-"I have never seen a nobler pile. Here is state, use, solidity, and beauty, most symmetrically combined together. Nothing abroad pleases me better, nothing at home approaches to it." He had contributed to the internal adornment as well as to the laying out of the gardens; for in March, 1666-7, we find him sending the Chancellor a list of "pictures that might be added to the assembly of the learned and heroic persons of England which your Lordship has already collected;" and dining with Lord Cornbury at Clarendon House, after the Chancellor's flight, he remarks in his 'Diary' that it is "now bravely furnished, especially with the pictures of most of our ancient and modern wits, poets, philosophers, famous and learned Englishmen, which collection I much commended and gave a catalogue of more to be added." In April, 1667, he alludes to the library. In short, the house and gardens of the Earl of Clarendon seem to have resembled, in stately dignity, the style of his History of the Great Rebellion,' and to have been in strict keeping with the tasteful and reserved character of that thoroughbred Englishman, who, like Bacon or Milton, preserved a solemn air, even in his enjoyments; of whom Evelyn said, "he was of a jolly temper after the old English fashion." Clarendon's love for this villa was strong, for even in exile, after writing that "his weakness and vanity" in the outlay he made upon it "more contributed to that gust of envy that had so violently shaken him than any misdemeanor that he was thought to have been guilty of," he

confesses that, when it was proposed to sell it, in order to pay his debts and make some provision for his younger children, "he remained so infatuated with the delight he had enjoyed, that though he was deprived of it he hearkened very unwillingly to the advice."

A storm of public wrath did indeed rage around Clarendon House. “Mr. Hater tells me, at noon," writes Pepys on the 14th of June, 1667, "that some rude people have been, as he hears, at my Lord Chancellor's, where they have cut down the trees before his house and broke his windows; and a gibbet either set up before or painted upon his gate, and these words writ: Three sights to be seen-Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren Queen.'" The plague, the great fire, and the disgraceful war with Holland, had goaded the public mind into a temper of savage mutiny; and the "wits and misses," to aid their court intrigues against the Chancellor, had done what in them lay to direct the storm against his head. The marriage of the Chancellor's daughter to the Duke of York, and the barrenness of the Queen, were represented as the results of a plot; the situation of Clarendon House, looking down on St. James's, and the employment of stones collected with a view to repair St. Paul's, were tortured into crimes. An unsparing lampoon, in the State Poems,' is entitled 'Clarendon's House-warming;' and still more venomous, though more rugged, are some rhymes quoted by D'Israeli from a MS. poem of that day :—

Whose sacrilege plunder'd the stones from St. Paul's.
When Queen Dido landed she bought as much ground
As the hide of a lusty fat ox would surround;

But when the said hide was cut into thongs,

A city and kingdom to Hyde belongs;

So here in court, church, and country far and wide,
Here's nought to be seen but Hyde! Hyde! Hyde! \
Of old, and where law the kingdom divides,

'Twas our hides of land, 'tis now our land of Hydes !"

In front of Goring House we saw the clever, vain, vulgar, honest Pepys waiting in the crowd to see the new Chancellor when Clarendon was unseated. The high-minded Evelyn carries us into the presence of overthrown grandeur on t'other side the way. Whatever may be men's opinions of the balance of Lord Clarendon's virtues and faults, elevation and weaknesses, he must be admitted to be one who fought stoutly in the long earnest struggle from 1641 to the Restoration: he had a powerful mind, and a tragic interest attaches to his fall. "1667. August 27. Visited the Lord Chancellor, to whom his Majesty had sent for the seals a few days before: I found him in his bed-chamber very sad. The Parliament had accused him, and he had enemies at court, especially the buffoons and ladies of pleasure, because he thwarted some of them and stood in their way.'

I could name some of the chief. The truth is, he made few friends during his grandeur among the royal sufferers, but advanced the old rebels. He was, however, though no considerable lawyer, one who kept up the form and substance of things with more solemnity than some would have had. *** 28th. I dined with my late Lord Chancellor : *** His Lordship pretty well in heart, though now many of his friends and sycophants abandoned him.-December 9. To visit the late Lord Chancellor. I found him in his garden, at his new-built palace, sitting in his gout-wheel-chair, and seeing the gates setting up towards the north. and the fields. He looked and spake very disconsolately. Next morning I heard he was gone."

The same kind and delicate chronicler who notes the exit of the founder records the fate of the building he reared and loved so well:-" 19th June, 1683. I returned to town with the Earl of Clarendon: when passing by the glorious palace his father built but a few years before, which they were now demolishing, being sold to certain undertakers, I turned my head the contrary way till the coach was gone past it, lest I might minister occasion of speaking of it, which must needs have grieved him that in so short a time their pomp was fallen." And on the 18th of September-"I went to survey the sad demolition of Clarendon House, that costly and only sumptuous palace of the late Lord Chancellor Hyde, where I have often been so cheerful with him, and sometimes so sad. * The Chancellor gone and dying in exile, the Earl, his successor, sold that which cost 50,000%. building to the young Duke of Albemarle for 25,000l. to pay debts, which how contracted remains yet a mystery, his son being no way a prodigal. Some imagine the Duchess, his daughter, had been chargeable to him. However it were, this stately palace is decreed to ruin, to support the prodigious waste the Duke of Albemarle had made of his estate since the old man died. He sold it to the highest bidder, and it fell to certain rich bankers and mechanics, who gave for it and the ground about it 35,000.; they design a new town as it were, and a most magnificent piazza. 'Tis said they have already materials towards it, with what they sold of the house alone, more worth than what they paid for it. See the vicissitude of earthly things! I was astonished at the demolition, nor less at the little army of labourers and artificers levelling the ground, laying foundations, and contriving great buildings, at an expense of 200,000%. if they perfect their design."

Lord Berkeley's house, begun, according to Pepys, about the same time with that of Lord Clarendon, on the west side of it, is described by Evelyn in these terms:-" 25th September, 1672. I dined at Lord John Berkeley's. It was in his new house, or rather palace, for I am assured it stood him in nearly 30,0007. It is very well built, and has many noble rooms, but they are not very convenient, consisting but of one Corps de logis: they are all rooms of state, without closets. The staircase is of cedar; the furniture is princely; the kitchen and stables are ill placed, and the corridor worse, having no respect to the wings they join to. For the rest, the fore-court is noble, so are the stables, and, above all, the gardens, which are incomparable, by reason of the inequality of the ground, and a pretty piscina. The holly hedges on the terrace I advised the planting of. The porticoes are in imitation of a house described by Palladio, but it happens to be the worst in his book, though my good friend, Mr. Hugh