which the piles of fruit give, as nothing else can! Turner's early love for the oranges, which he knew so well in his home near Covent Garden, comes out in his later life, in his "Wreck of the Orange Vessel," in which the fruits of his boyish study are seen tossing and reeling on the waves.

The later existence of Covent Garden has become associated with actors and actresses, from its neighbourhood to the Cock-pit, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden Theatres.

"The convent becomes a playhouse; monks and nuns turn actors and actresses. The garden, formal and quiet, where a salad was cut for a lady abbess, and flowers were gathered to adorn images, becomes a market, noisy and full of life, distributing thousands of fruits and flowers to a vicious metropolis."—W. S. Landor.

Thackeray has left a vivid description of Covent Garden in its present state :—

"The two great national theatres on one side, a churchyard full of mouldy but undying celebrities on the other; a fringe of houses studded in every part with anecdote or history; an arcade often more gloomy and deserted than a cathedral aisle; a rich cluster of brown old taverns--one of them filled with the counterfeit presentments of many actors long since silent; who scowl and smile once more from the canvas upon the grandsons of their dead admirers; a something in the air which breathes of old books, old painters, and old authors; a place beyond all other places one would choose in which to hear the chimes at midnight, a crystal palace-the representative of the presentwhich presses in timidly from a corner upon many things of the past; a withered bank that has been sucked dry by a felonious clerk, a squat building with a hundred columns, and chapel-looking fronts, which always stands knee-deep in baskets, flowers, and scattered vegetables; a common centre into which Nature showers her choicest gifts, and where the kindly fruits of the earth often nearly choke the narrow thoroughfares; a population that never seems to sleep, and that does all in its power to prevent others sleeping; a place where the very latest suppers and the earliest breakfasts jostle each other over the footways."

The names of the greater part of the streets around Covent Garden bear evidence to the time of their erection. Besides those called after the noble family which owned them, we have King Street, Charles Street, and Henrietta Street, called after Charles I. and his Queen; James Street and York Street from the Duke of York; Catherine Street from Catherine of Braganza. Some of the doors in King Street are of mahogany, for here lived the lady by whom that wood was first introduced. That Bow Street, on the west of Covent Garden, was once fashionable, we learn from the epilogue of one of Dryden's plays—

"I've had to-day a dozen billets doux

From fops, and wits, and cits, and Bow Street beaux;'

but, as Sir Walter Scott observes, "a billet doux from Bow Street," which has been associated with the principal police-courts of London for more than a century, "would now be more alarming than flattering." Edmund Waller the poet, and Grinling Gibbons the sculptor, lived in this street, and, at one time, while he was writing "Tom Jones," Fielding the novelist. It was to this street also that Charles II. came to visit Wycherley when he was ill, and gave him £500 that he might go to the south of France for his health. Bow Street became famous in the last century as containing Will's-the "Wits' Coffee House," described in Prior's "Town and Country Mouse," where you might

66 see

Priests sipping coffee, sparks and poets, tea."

It was brought into fashion by its being the resort of Dryden. Hither Pope, at twelve years old, persuaded

his friends to bring him that he might look upon the great poet of his childish veneration, whom he afterwards described as "a plump man, with a down look, and not very conversable."

"Will's" continued to be the Wits' Coffee House till Addison drew them to "Button's" (who had been a servant of his),* in the neighbouring Great Russell Street. Here Pope describes him as coming to dine daily, and remaining for five or six hours afterwards. At "Tom's Coffee House," at No. 17 in the same street, Dr. Mead, the most famous of English physicians from the reign of Queen Anne to that of George II., used to sit daily, prescribing for his patients upon written or oral statements from their apothecaries. This was the favourite resort of Johnson and Garrick; here also was daily to be seen the familiar figure of Sir Joshua Reynolds, with his spectacles on his nose, his trumpet always in his ear, and his silver snuff-box ever in his hand. It was at No. 8 in this street that Boswell first saw Dr. Johnson.

In Maiden Lane, which runs parallel with the Strand to the south of Covent Garden, the great artist Turner was born in May, 1775, in the shop of his father, who was a hairdresser. Maiden Lane leads into Chandos Street, where Claude Duval was taken, at the tavern called "the Hole in the Wall," in 1669.

Returning to the Strand, Burleigh Street and Exeter Street commemorate Exeter House, where the great Lord Burleigh lived and died. Elizabeth came here to see him when he was ill, in a headdress so high that she could not enter the door. The groom of the chambers ventured to urge her to

* Pope in "Spence's Anecdotes."

stoop. "I will stoop for your master," she said, "but not for the King of Spain ;" and when Lord Burleigh himself apologized for not being able to stand up to receive her on account of the badness of his legs, she replied, "My lord, we do not make use of you for the badness of your legs, but for the goodness of your head." The site of the house was afterwards occupied by the Exeter Change, which contained a famous menagerie, of which the elephant Chunee, whose skeleton is now at the College of Surgeons, was a distinctive feature. Between the two streets now stands Exeter Hall (built in 1831 by Deering), celebrated for its concerts and its religious" May meetings."

On the right, on the site of Beaufort Buildings, stood Worcester House, once the palace of the Bishops of Carlisle, afterwards rented from the Marquis of Worcester by the Lord Chancellor Hyde. Here it was that, with outward reluctance and secret glee, he connived at the strange marriage of his daughter Anne, which was celebrated in the middle of the night of September 3, 1662, with the Duke of York, afterwards James II. The house was pulled down when the Duke of Beaufort bought Buckingham House in Chelsea. In Beaufort Buildings lived Fielding the novelist, and it was here that, having given away to a needy friend the money which had been advanced to him in his poverty by Jacob Tonson the publisher, for the payment of his taxes, he said coolly to the astonished collector, "Friendship has called for the money, and had it, let the tax-gatherer call again."

We must now turn aside by a narrow street upon the right of the Strand, and it will be with a sense of almost surprise as well as relief that we find ourselves transported from the

noise and bustle of the crowded thoroughfare to the peaceful quietude of a sunny churchyard, where the old grey tombstones are shaded by a grove of plane-trees and lilacs, and where an ancient church stands upon a height, with an open view towards the gleaming river with its busy Embankment, and Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament rising in the stillness of the purple haze beyond. We are "completely out of the world, although on the very skirt, and verge, and hem of the roaring world of London."* In this churchyard, and on the ground now occupied by all the neighbouring courts and warehouses, once stood the famous Savoy Palace. Having been built by Peter, brother of Archbishop Boniface, and uncle of Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III., when he came over on a visit to his niece, it became a centre for all the princes, ecclesiastics, and artists who flowed into London in consequence of her marriage. He bequeathed it to the monks of Montjoy at Havering at the Bower, from whom it was bought by Queen Eleanor for her second son Edmund, Earl of Lancaster. It continued in the hands of his descendants, and, after the battle of Poitiers, in 1356, became the residence of the captive King John of France. John was set free in October, 1360, but being unable to fulfil the conditions of his release, and unwilling to cede to his captor the Black Prince in chivalry and honour, voluntarily returned, and being again assigned a residence in the Savoy, died there April 9, 1364, at which, says Froissart," the King, Queen, and princes of the blood, and all the nobles of England, were exceedingly concerned, from the great love and affection King John had shown them since the conclusion of peace."

G. A. Sala.