I cross'd the sea; for I was free,
           And honour'd for my wealth:
       Yet am I withering secretly,
           And fading as by stealth.

      I wander idly up and down;
           And, in my drooping soul,
       Every coin among my store
           Is like a flaming coal.

               LEICESTER SQUARE.

DID Archimedes square the circle? The
legend (and I have a great respect for legends,
mendacious though they often be) says that he
did. The legend has it that he really, truly,
and completely succeeded. That, chalk in
hand, heedless in his scientific pre-occupation
of the sack of Syracuse, he bent over the
magic diagram he had traced on the floor of
his humble domicile, contemplating with joy
and exultation the glorious end by which his
labours had been crowned. That then,
however, a soldier entered, hot with plunder and
blood-spilling. That with his murderous
javelin he smote the sage to death; and that
the blood of Archimedes flowing in a sluggish
stream effaced the diagram (which was to the
ruthless warrior merely an unmeaning
assemblage of curved and straight lines), so that
the circle remains unsquared to this day.

Many have experimentalised with the
mighty mystery since the legendary days of
the Greek philosopher; but the failures have
been as numerous as the attempts. Not that
the thing is impossible; oh no! All of us
have, more or less, friends and acquaintances
on the very verge—the extreme
point—of squaring the circle, also of
discovering perpetual motion, paying the
National debt, and accomplishing some trifling
little undertakings of that description. Only,
they never do. They resemble somewhat
the poor little "punters" one sees at
Hombourg and Baden-Baden—the men with
"systems"—infallible "martingales" who
would always have won fifty thousand florins
to a dead certainty, in one coup, my dear sir,
if red had only turned up again. But it didn't.
Red never does turn up when you want it.
So with the circle-squarers, perpetual motion
discoverers, national debt liquidators, and
inventors of directing power to balloons.
Something always occurs at the very ace and
nick of time—the critical moment—to nip
their invention in the bud. My friend A
would have squared the circle, weeks ago, if
he had not been sentenced to six months'
imprisonment in one of Her Majesty's gaols for
writing threatening letters to Lord John
Russell, in which the circle was mixed up,
somehow, with a desire to have his
lordship's life. B is only deterred from
terminating his experiments by the want of a
loan (temporary) of one pound five. C's
landlady, in the neighbourhood of Red Lion
Square, has impounded for unpaid rent his
philosophical apparatus, without which it is
impossible for him to complete his discoveries.
D, on the very eve of success, took it into his
head to preach the Millennium, as connected
with the New Jerusalem and the Latter-day
Saints, in the vicinity of Rotherhithe; and as
for E, the only man who they say has squared
the circle these few hundred years, he is at
present so raving mad in a lunatic asylum,
that we can't make much of the diagrams he
chalks on the walls of his day room, mixed as
are his angles, arcs, and diameters with
humorous couplets and caricatures of public
characters. I might, if I chose, enumerate
initials which would use up the alphabet
twice over; from M, who combined philosophy
with the manufacture of Bengal lights, and
blew himself, and half his neighbourhood, up
one day, down to Z; who, impressed with a
conviction that the circle was only to be
squared in the interior of Africa, went out to
the Gold Coast in a trader, and was supposed to
have been eaten up by the natives, somewhere
between Timbuctoo and the Mountains of
the Moon. Still, the circle remains unsquared.

I, who am no mathematician, and would
sooner throw myself off the parapet of the
pons asinorum than trudge over it, not
presuming to attempt squaring a circle, humbly
intend to see if I cannot circle a square. Say
Leicester Square, in the county of Middlesex.

In my opinion Leicester Square, or Leicester
Fields, or "the Square," as its inhabitants
call it, or "Laystarr Squarr" as the French
have it, offers in many of its features some
striking points of resemblance to an institution
expatiated upon by Monsieur Philip de
Lolme, called the British Constitution. The
square, like the Constitution, has been
infinitely patched, and tinkered, and altered.
Some of its bulwarks have been broken down;
some of its monuments have been utterly
destroyed; and coaches and six may now be
driven where edifices were. But in their
entirety both institutions are unchanged. The
Square and the Constitution have yet their
Habeas Corpus and their Bill of Rights.
Much has been abolished, changed, improved;
but the Square is the Square and the
Constitution is the Constitution; and the Briton
may point to both with pride, as immutable
evidence of the stability of the institutions of
a free country.

Before I commence circling seriatim this
square—which I may call the liver of London,
often spoken of but little known—let me say a
few words of its history. This quadrangle of
houses once went by the name of Leicester
Fields. These fields (now partially covered by
Mr. WyId's great globe) were built round, three
sides of them, about 1635, what time Charles
the First was in difficulties about ship-money,
and thirsting for Mr. Pym's ears. During
the civil wars and Commonwealth, the powers
that were, occupied themselves rather more
with pulling down mansions than with
building them; and the south side remained