uncovered with houses until the days of that
virtuous and exemplary monarch, who passed
the bill for the better observance of the
Sabbath, and murdered Algernon Sydney.
From 1671 to the middle of the eighteenth
century, Leicester Fields were Leicester
Fields. Then the royal German gentleman,
second of his name, endowed the enclosure
in the centre with an equestrian statue of his
gracious self (brought from Canons, the seat
of the Duke of Chandos), and the fields became
thenceforward a square, and fashionable.

Fashionable, to a certain extent, they had
been before; since Charles the Second's
time, Leicester Fields had boasted the possession
of a palace. Yes, between where there
is now a sixpenny show with a Shades beneath,
and where there is a cigar-shop, once stood
Leicester House, built by Robert Sydney,
Earl of Leicester, the father of poor Algernon
Sydney, of Henry Sydney (the handsome
Sydney of De Grammont's Memoirs), and of
Lady Dorothy Sydney, the Sacharissa of
Waller the poet. Here, when the Sydneys
had come to grief, lived and died the Queen
of Bohemia. Here resided the great Colbert,
Louis the Fourteenth's ablest minister of
finance and commerce, when on an embassy
to King Charles the Second. Here, in 1703,
lived (hiring the house from Lord Leicester)
the ambassador from the Emperor of Ger-
many. Prince Eugene lay at Leicester House,
and courtiers (no doubt) lied there in 1713.
In 1718, no less a personage than the Prince
of Wales bought Leicester House, and made
it his town residence. Pennant, that sly old
antiquary—whose wit, though dry, like old
port, is as nutty and full flavoured—calls it
the "pouting house for princes;" for here,
when the next Prince of Wales, Frederick,
quarrelled with his papa (who had quarrelled
with his) he, too, removed to Leicester House
and kept a little sulky Court there.

Of Leicester House, palatially speaking,
what now remains? Of that princely north-east
corner of the square, what is there, save a
foreigner-frequented cigar-shop? Stay, there
is yet the Shades, suggestive still of semi-regal
kitchens, in their underground vastness. And
haply there is, above, Saville House, a palace
once, for George the Third's sister was married
from thence—so says the European Magazine
for 1761—to a German prince, and, to
her misfortune, poor soul, as her German
prison cell shall tell her in years to come. And
Saville House is a palace still, far more palatial
than if kings sat in its upper rooms, and
princes in its gates. It is the palace of
showmanship. It is the greatest booth in Europe.

Saville House! What Londoner, what
country cousin who visited the metropolis
twenty years ago, does not immediately
connect that magic establishment with the name
of Miss Linwood and her needlework? It was
very wonderful. I, as a child, never could
make it out much, or settle satisfactorily to
my own mind, why it should not, being carpeting,
have been spread upon the floor instead
of being hung against the wall. I did not
like the eyes, noses, and lips of the characters
being all in little quadrangles; and I was
beaten once, I think, for saying that I thought
my sister's sampler superior to any of Miss
Linwood's productions. Yet her work was
very wonderful; not quite equal to Gobelin
tapestry, perhaps, but colossal as respects
patience, neatness, and ingenuity. Of and
concerning Miss Linwood I was wont in
my nonage to be much puzzled. Who and
what was this marvellous being? I have
since heard, and I now believe that Miss
Linwood was a simple-minded exemplary school-
mistress, somewhere near Leicester—a species
of needleworking Hannah More; but at that
time she was to me a tremendous myth—a,
tapestry veiled prophetess—a sybil working
out perpetual enigmas in silk and worsted.

The shows at Saville House are yet all
alive o! What show of shows came after
Miss Linwood? There were some, clumsy
caricatures of good pictures and good statues,
enacted on a turn-table by brazen men
and women, called Poses Plastiques. I, your
servant, assisted once at a representation
of this description, where I think the subject
was Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.
Adam by Herr Something, Eve by Madame
Somebody, and the serpent by a real serpent,
a bloated old snake quite sluggish and dozy,
and harmless enough, between his rabbits, to
be tied in a knot round the tree. The most
amusing part of the entertainment was the
middle thereof, at which point two warriors
arrayed in the uniform of Her Majesty
appeared on the turn-table, and claimed
Adam as a deserter from the third Buffs:
which indeed he was, and so was summarily
marched off with a great-coat over his
fleshings, and a neat pair of handcuffs on his
wrists the which sent me home moralising on
the charming efficiency of the Lord Chamberlain
and his licensers, which can strike a
harmless joke out of a pantomime, and
cannot touch such fellows as these, going
vagabondising about with nothing to cover
them. I think I went the same evening to a
certain theatre, where I saw the most magnificent
parable in the New Testament parodied
into a gew-gaw spectacle a convention
between the property man, the scene painter, and
the corps de ballet—which made me think
that the Lord Chamberlain and his licensers
did not dispense their justices quite even-
handedly; that they strained at the gnats a
little too much, may be, and swallowed the
camels a little too easily.

Serpents both of land and sea;—panoramas
of all the rivers of the known world; jugglers:
ventriloquists; imitators of the noises of
animals; dioramas of the North pole, and the
gold-diggings of California; somnambulists
(very lucid); ladies who have cheerfully
submitted to have their heads cut off nightly at
sixpence per head admission; giants; dwarfs;