matician and divine, called by Charles II. "an unfair preacher, because he exhausted every subject," died here over a saddler's shop (1677) in his forty-seventh year. In Hartshorn Lane, close by, lived the mother of Ben Jonson, and hence she sent her boy "to a private school in the Church of St. Martin in the Fields."* "Though I cannot with all my industrious inquiry find him in his cradle, I can fetch him from long-coats. When a little child he lived in Hartshorn Lane near Charing Cross, where his mother married a bricklayer for her second husband.”—Fuller's Worthies. The Swan at Charing Cross was the scene of Ben Jonson's droll extempore grace before James I., for which the king gave him a hundred pounds. The fact that proclamations were formerly made at Charing Cross, giving rise to the allusion in Swift "Where all that passes inter nos May be proclaimed at Charing Cross," has passed into a byword. The most interesting approach to the City of London is by that which leads to it from Charing Cross-the great highway of the Strand, "down which the tide of labour flows daily to the City," + and where Charles Lamb says that he "often shed tears for fulness of joy at such multitude of life." To us, when we think of it, the Strand is only a vast thoroughfare crowded with traffic, and the place whither we go to find Exeter Hall, or the Adelphi or Gaiety theatres, • Sir Thomas Pope Blunt's "Censura Authorum." † Blanchard Jerrold. In as our taste may guide us. But the name which the street still bears will remind us of its position, following the strand, the shore, of the Thames. This was the first cause of its popularity, and of its becoming for three hundred years what the Corso is to Rome, and the Via Nuova to Genoa, a street of palaces. The rise of these palaces was very gradual. As late as the reign of Edward II. (1315) a petition was presented complaining that the road from Temple Bar to Westminster was so infamously bad that it was ruinous to the feet both of men and horses, and moreover that it was overgrown with thickets and bushes. the time of Edward III. the rapid watercourses which crossed that road and fell into the Thames were traversed by bridges, of which there were three between Charing Cross and Temple Bar. Of two of these bridges the names are still preserved to us in the names of two existing streetsIvy Bridge Lane and Strand Bridge Lane; the third bridge has itself been seen by many living persons. It was discovered in 1802, buried deep beneath the soil near St. Clement's Church, and was laid bare during the formation of some new sewers. In the reign of Henry VIII. “the road of the Strand was still described as full of pits and sloughs, very perilous and noisome." But the Strand was the highway from the royal palace at Westminster to the royal palace on the Fleet, and so became popular with the aristocracy. Gradually great houses had sprung up along its course, the earliest being Essex House, Durham House, and the Palace of the Bishops of Norwich, afterwards called York House; though even in Elizabeth's time the succession was rather one of country palaces than of town residences, for all the great houses looked into fields upon the north, and on the south had large and pleasant gardens sloping towards the river. Till the Great Fire drove the impulse of building westwards and the open ground of Drury Lane and its neighbourhood was built upon, the Strand was scarcely a street in its present sense; but it was already crowded as a thoroughfare. Even in 1628 George Wither, the Puritan Poet, in his "Britain's Remembrancer," speaks of "The Strand, that goodly throw-fare betweene It was in the Strand that (May 29, 1660) Evelyn "stood and beheld and blessed God" for the triumphal entry of Charles II. As the houses closed in two hundred years ago and the Strand became a regular street, it was enlivened by every house and shop having its own sign, which long took the place of the numbers now attached to them. Chaucer and Shakspeare when in London would have been directed to at the sign of the Dog, or the Golden Unicorn, or the Three Crowns, or whatever the emblem of the house might be at which they were residing. The signs were all swept away in the reign of George III., both because they had then acquired so great a size, and projected so far over the street, and because on a windy day they were blown to and fro with horrible creaking and groaning, and were often torn off and thrown down, killing the foot-passengers in their fall. Many old London signs are preserved in the City Museum of the Guildhall, and are very curious. The persons who lived in the houses so distinguished were frequently sur named from their signs. Thus the famous Thomas à Becket was in his youth called "Thomas of the Snipe," from the emblem of the house where he was born. One only of the great Strand palaces has survived entire to our own time. We have all of us seen and mourned over Northumberland House, one of the noblest Jacobean buildings in England, and the most picturesque feature of London. The original design was by Jansen, but it was altered by Inigo Jones, and from the plans of the latter the house was begun (in 1603) by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, who was ridiculed for building so large a residence in the then country village of Charing. He bequeathed it to his nephew, the Earl of Suffolk, who was the builder of Audley End, and who finished the garden side of the house. It was then called Suffolk House, but changed its name (in 1642) when Elizabeth, daughter of the second Earl of Suffolk, married Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland. On his death it passed to his daughter, Lady Elizabeth Percy, who was twice a widow and three times a wife before she was seventeen. Her third husband was Charles Seymour, commonly called the proud Duke of Somerset, who was one of the chief figures in the pageants and politics of six reigns, having supported the chief mourner at the funeral of Charles II., and carried the orb at the coronation of George II. It was this Duke who never allowed his daughters to sit down in his presence, even when they were nursing him for days and weeks together, in his eighty-seventh year at Northumberland House, and who omitted one of his daughters in his will because he caught her involuntarily napping by his bedside. In his last years his punctiliousness so little decreased that when his second wife, Lady Charlotte Finch, once ventured to pat him playfully on the shoulder, he turned round upon her with, "Madam, my first wife was a Percy, and she would never have taken such a liberty." It was a son of this proud Duke who was created Earl of Northumberland, with remainder to his only daughter, who married Sir Hugh Smithson, created Duke of Northumberland in 1766. Added to, and altered at different periods, the greater part of the house, though charming as a residence, was architecturally unimportant. But when it was partially rebuilt, the original features of the Strand front had always been preserved-and as we saw its beautiful gateway, so with the exception of a few additional ornaments, Inigo Jones designed it. The balustrade was originally formed by an inscription in capital letters, as at Audley End and Temple Newsam, and it is recorded that the fall of one of these letters killed a spectator as the funeral of Anne of Denmark was passing. High above the porch stood for a hundred and twenty-five years a leaden lion, the crest of the Percies (now removed to Syon House); and it was a favourite question, which few could answer right, which way the familiar animal's tail pointed. Of all the barbarous and ridiculous injuries by which London has been wantonly mutilated within the last few years, the destruction of Northumberland House has been the greatest. The removal of some ugly houses on the west, and the sacrifice of a corner of the garden, might have given a better turn to the street now called Northumberland Avenue, and have saved the finest great historical house in London, "commenced by a Howard, continued by a Percy, and completed by a Seymour "-the house in which the restoration of the |