EVERY one knows the Leicester Square of to-day, with its trim garden and statues, and swarms of dirty loafers and ragged Arabs, its shops and sale-rooms, its two huge theatres, glittering like fairy palaces through the foggy night air; its grimy foreigners, its flaunting vice, its pushing crowds and Babel of many tongues. Let me put beside this bustling picture another of Leicester Fields in the days of Shakespeare.

A wild, desolate waste, as much in the country as Hampstead Heath is now, an expanse of grass, bush and bramble; there is the old church of St. Martin's -not the classic building of to-day-standing literally in the Fields, its western front opening on a muddy lane fenced in by hedges and broken banks, on the other side of which is a line of low buildings, the King's Mews, the present site of Trafalgar Square; to the west the sails of a windmill move lazily in the breeze; to the south clusters the little village of Charing, backed by the fretted towers of Westminster; the great mansions of the nobility, marshaled along the Strand on either side, conceal "the silver winding

Here in 1632 the Earl of Leicester, Algernon Sidney's father, built a mansion upon a piece of ground then known as Swan's Close, surrounded it with extensive gardens, and gave his name to the district. Soon other houses were erected in the vicinity, and a square was formed, the centre of which was after a while laid out with grass plots and paths, and railed in. The readers of Esmond will be reminded of that wonderfully graphic scene, the duel between Mohun and Lord Castlewood, an incident that was suggested, no doubt, by an historical encounter as bloody as the fictitious, in which Mohun, one of the greatest scoundrels of his time, was also a principal.

Soon after midnight, on the 29th of October, 1698, when most of the inhabitants had retired to rest, and the watchman was slumbering in his box, a sudden glare reddened the moonlight, a confusion of voices agitated the silence, and from the direction of St. Martin's Lane, six sedan chairs, illumined by the smoky light of as many torches, were borne towards the Fields. A company of roisterers, all men of note, the Earl of Warwick, Lord Mohun and Mr. Coote, an Irish gentleman, on one side, and Captains James and France and Mr. Dockwra on the other, who had been drinking together at the Greyhound in the Strand, and having quarrelled over their cups, were coming thither to settle their differences at the point of the rapier. Finding the enclosure locked, they mounted

Such scenes were common enough in Leicester Fields, and indeed all kinds of violence, and its inhabitants were so accustomed to cries of "murder" that they paid no more heed to them than did the Charleys snoring in their boxes; so duellists and footpads, with which the place was infested, were seldom interrupted in their work.

References to Leicester House will be found in the pages of Pepys and Evelyn. It was there that the latter, after dining with Lady Sunderland, witnessed the extraordinary feats of Richardson the fire-eater (8th Oct., 1672), who " devoured brimstone on hot coals, and melted glass and roasted an oyster in its shell on a red-hot coal placed upon his tongue and blown

In 1718 the Prince of Wales, having been kicked out of St. James's by his amiable father, George I., for rebellious conduct, purchased Leicester House and resided there until his accession to the throne. And here butcher Cumberland, his son, was born. It has been the tradition of the Hanoverian sovereigns that the de facto and the in futuro representative of the dynasty could never get on together, and when Frederick, Prince of Wales was expelled from St. James's, as his father had been before him, and for a similar offence, he also took up his abode in Leicester House. Mother and father both hated Frederick, and the young man returned the compliment with equal

Yet he surrounded himself with quite an intellectual coterie, to which all the clever men of the Tory party were welcomed-he was Tory because the king was Whig, as the Prince Regent was a Whig because his father was a Tory; it was always the way with the Guelphs.

Walpole, in a letter to Mann (11th March, 1750), writes: " The Middlesex election is carried on against the court; the prince, in a green frock (and I won't swear but in a Scotch plaid waistcoat), sat under the park wall in his chair, and hallooed the rioters on to Brentford. The Jacobites are so transported that they are opening subscriptions for all boroughs that shall be vacant."

It was the time of the deadly feud between Handel and Bunoncini, and all the town took sides, the Duchess of Marlborough spent £ 12,000 to ruin the composer of The Messiah at the King's Theatre.

On the 20th of March, 1751, Leicester House was draped with black for the death of its owner. When the news was carried to St. James's, his royal father was playing at cards with one of his fraus. He turned pale and whispered to her, " He is dead," and then continued the game as if nothing had happened. I will quote one of the numerous epitaphs written upon the Prince to show the estimation in which the House of Hanover was held by all the nation-only excepting the bigoted Whigs:-

Here lies Fred,

Who was alive and is dead !

Had it been his father

I had much rather;

Had it been his brother

Much better than another;

Had it been his sister

No one would have missed her;

Had it been the whole generation,

Still better for the nation;

But since it was Fred,

Who was alive and is dead

There is no more to be said.

George III. was born in Leicester House and passed all his youth there under the tutelage of his mother and her cher ami, Lord Bute, and was proclaimed king in front of it. At the death of the princess, 1766, who, though hard, domineering and narrow-minded, had had between her husband, fatherin-law and "the Boot," 1 a sorry life, the mansion fell into other hands, and was pulled down in 1790. The site of it is indicated by Leicester Place; Lisle Street was run through the grounds.

Savile House, which stood on the western side of Leicester House, was built about the same time as its neighbour. In 1698 Peter the Great lodged there; it was afterwards annexed to the royal residence. In the Gordon riots it was gutted and half-burned because its owner, Sir George Savile, had brought the Catholic Bill into Parliament. When rebuilt Savile House was opened as a museum; and then as the "Linwood Gallery," a famous exhibition of needlework, which was to country cousins what Madame Tussaud's is now. Here were to be seen sixty copies of some of the finest pictures in Europe, executed by the needle. After the exhibition was sold off in 1844, all kinds of shows, including Madame Wharton's notorious Poses Plastiques, occupied the premises, until the fire of 1865 demolished them. The establishments of Messrs. Bickers & Bush and of Messrs. Stagg & Mantle and the Empire Theatre now cover the site.

When Sir James Thornhill became reconciled to The nickname of the obnoxious Marquis of Bute. 16

Of quite another order was the famous painter, who, little more than three years before the death of the incomparable satirist, came to live at No. 47, on the opposite side of the square. In Messrs. Puttick & Simpson's auction rooms much yet remains of Sir Joshua Reynolds' old house-the sale-room was his studio; the broad staircase, likewise is, I believe, the original one. What a procession of ghosts one might imagine gliding up those dusty stairs, and passing into the whilom studio; ghosts of the celebrated people, the lords and ladies, statesmen, literati, artistes, actors, notorieties who have sat there and upon whose " counterfeit presentments," given us by the hand of the great master, the world has been gazing admiringly

In our homage to these Oracles of Art, however, we must not overlook a great scientist, to whom our poor frail bodies owe a deep debt of gratitude. John Hunter's house and anatomical museum stood upon the site of the Alhambra. Here in the closing years of the last century the celebrated surgeon held on Sunday evenings his receptions, to which all the medical profession was invited.

The greatest name of all those associated with Leicester Fields, however, is that of Sir Isaac Newton, whose battered old house in St. Martin's Street, on the south side of the square, is marked by a plate. But the heyday of his life was past and he was an old man when he came to live here, in 1710, and the observatory, which tradition says was his, there is reason to believe was erected after his death by a Frenchman. Few are the recollections associated with the great philosopher's fifteen years' tenancy, but somewhere in the sixties of the last century Dr. Burney, the historian of music, took up his abode there, and, " few nobles," says Macaulay, "could assemble in the most stately mansions of Grosvenor Square or St. James's Square a society so various and so brilliant as was sometimes to be found in Dr. Burney's cabin". Hither came the greatest Italian singers of the day- Paccheorotti, Agujari, Gabrielli-all ready to display their

But there is a dark side to Leicester Square reminiscences which has yet to be touched upon. In the old gambling days it was notorious for its "hells ". Let me put back the clock a hundred years or more and try to call up a picture of these dens of infamy. The outer door of a sinister-looking house stands open, but there is an inner one closely guarded by a human Cerberus, who jealously surveys every arrival through a wicket, lest among the flies who are desirous to enter the spider's web there should be an inimical

Every stage and nearly every grade of manhood is represented. There is the young fellow who has just come into a fortune, every farthing of which he has lost this night. He cannot quite realise yet all the horror of it, but sits blank, white, staring, benumbed, paralysed. Most probably this time to-morrow he will be embedded in the Thames' mud; and there is an old man, blear-eyed and toothless, clutching the dice-box with trembling fingers, chuckling with delight when he claws up the gold the croupier pushes towards him; watching him with fiendish envy is a grizzled-haired man still in the prime of life, who has just staked and lost his last guinea, his livid features dank with sweat, his eyes bloodshot and glaring with incipient madness;

At last the croupiers, utterly overwhelmed by exhaustion, close the bank. Now out into the cold light of the morning stream forth the ghoulish crew, shivering at the touch of the crisp air, and blinking

And now we must retrace our steps to Temple Bar, and thence continue our course westward, until we arrive at the end of our pilgrimage.

[1] 1 These little dinners, which were served precisely at five, and no person was ever waited for, were not, to use the phraseology of the age, "elegant repasts"; there was a great deal of the freedom of bohemia about them, though the word was not coined, and the race not born just then. Prepared for seven or eight, the table had often to accommodate fifteen or sixteen; seats were sometimes shortknives, forks, plates and glasses often; the attendance was confusion, and the cookery not blameless. Beauclerc once suggested that a dish of peas should be sent to Hammersmith, because that was the way to Turnham Green. And the host sat quite calm, leaving every one at liberty to scramble for himself, and call for what he wanted. It was not the crockery, the food, the drink that constituted the charm of those dinners, but the brilliant people who sat around the board, and the brilliant talk of poets, physicians, lawyers, divines, historians, actors, peers, members of parliament, artists, musicians, scientists and dilettanti meeting on a ground of hearty ease, goodhumour and sociability.

[2] Gambling was no hole-and-corner vice in the eighteenth century; gaming-houses were as public and frankly avowed as theatres and taverns. In 1770 the Moorish ambassador kept a common gamingtable at his house in the Strand; in Golden Square the ambassador from Bavaria, and in Suffolk Street, Haymarket, the representative of Hesse Darmstadt turned their establishments to the same use. The privileges of these ministers safeguarded them from the law. Hannah More relates in one of her letters that at the opening of the Savoir Vivre, in St. James's Street, £60,000 were lost in one night. Young men of fashion sometimes lost £ 15,000 to £20,000 at a sitting. There is a story told of a young nobleman, who, after losing £ 11,000, won it back at a single hand at Hazard, upon which he exclaimed with an oath: " Now, if I had been playing deep, I might have won millions !" Here is a good story from Horace Walpole: "Within the week (1780) there has been a cast at Hazard at the Cocoa Tree, the difference of which amounted to one hundred and four-score thousand pounds. Mr. O'Brien, an Irish gamester, had won £ 100,000 off young Harvey of Chigwell, just started from a midshipman into an estate by his elder brother's death. O'Brien said, ' You can never pay me'. ' I can,' said the youth, 'my estate will sell for the debts.' 'No,' said O'Brien, ' I will win £ 10,000, and you shall throw for the odd £90,000.' They did, and Harvey won." More anecdotes of this terrible mania will be found in chapters xx. and xxi.