LEICESTER

SQUARE.

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CHAPTER I.

BEFORE THE HOUSES.

O part of London has outlived a century without curious vicissitudes. The odder the vicissitudes, the richer

the crop of memories. Leicester Square certainly yields to no rival of its own day and generation - Lincoln's Inn Fields, Covent Garden Piazza, Soho or Golden Squarein the strangeness of its changes and the variety of its associations. What a kaleidoscopic series of permutations and combinations does the Square present as we turn Time's glass,-whether in its residences, from the home of the Sidneys and the last resting-place of the Queen of Hearts,

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the nursery and court of the first three Princes of Wales of the Hanoverian line, to the tavern and table haunts of republican refugees and outat-elbows exiles; in its famous inhabitants, from the Sidneys and Sunderlands, Newton and Swift, the Marquis of Caermarthen and Speaker Onslow, Hogarth, Reynolds, and Sir George Savile, John Hunter, Cruikshank, and Charles Bell, Kosciusko and La Guicciolí, to Barber and Burford of the Panorama, and Dibdin of the Sea-Songs; in its architecture, from the stately Jacobean Leicester House of 1636, of the school, if not from the design, of Inigo Jones, to the bastard Byzantine of Wylde's Great Globe and the gingerbread Moresque of the Alhambra; in its social gatherings, from Sir Joshua's famous dinner-table, focus of all that was most distinguished for art and literature, wit and wisdom, science and social distinction, in the most brilliant circles of the most brilliant epoch of English society, to the cheap restaurants and subterranean "shades" of a later generation, haunts of the most questionable company, native and foreign, round repasts as questionable its exhibitions, from Sir Ashton Lever's Holophusiconno contemptible rival

of the British Museum-to the Invisible Girl and the Industrious Fleas : its metamorphoses, as of Hogarth's house, at the sign of the Golden Head, into Archbishop Tenison's schools; of John Hunter's mansion and museum into the dingy office of the "International, Journal Quotidien Français," below, and the head-quarters of the First Middlesex Artillery Volunteers above; or of Sir Joshua's studio into Puttick and Simpson's sale-rooms: its failures, from the high-reaching educational aims of the Cosmos Institute, to the more frivolous but still ambitious project of the promoters of the Alexandra Theatre and Winter Garden, whose notice-board still impends the charred ruins of Savile House: its antiquities, from Miss Linwood's musty and mournful gallery, still remembered by survivors of the last generation, to that deplorable horse and his rider, whose long martyrdom of ridicule and insult has at length come to a close. . . . And all these changes and contrasts culminating in this last transformation of the seedy, shabby, dingy, and disreputable Leicester Square enclosure of recent recollection, into the trimly-turfed and gaily-flowered garden, with its seats and gravelled walks and marble

fountain, its central statue of Shakespeare and its commemorative busts of Newton and Hogarth, Reynolds and Hunter, so lately handed over to the Metropolitan Board of Works by Baron Albert Grant, M.P.

It is true that the vicissitudes of a London quarter usually follow a downward road. And the more easterly it lies, the more decidedly downwards its tendency. From being fashionable, it may become professional, and hold there, as Lincoln's Inn Fields does: or it may resign itself to come down from mansion houses to hotels, as Covent Garden Piazza has done: or may fall still lower, as Golden Square has fallen, to lodging and boarding-houses of the cheaper and more cosmospolitan kind: or may become frankly industrial, like Soho Square. Even if situated within the charmed circle of the West End the London square is not safe from vicissitude. Clubs and Institutions will gradually elbow out noblemen's residences; and this change, already consummated over more than half of St. James's Square, may in time spread to other and, as yet, unassailed centres of fashion further and further west, driving the upper ten, at last,