frequently visited the houses in which he
had lived. Suspicions of my motives and
smiles at my enthusiasm did not prevent me
asking, with my best bows and politest
speeches, permission to look at the very
rooms he had occupied. I read up the
descriptions of the costumes and manners of
his time. I demolished London until I had
reduced the monster metropolis to the condition
and dimensions of his day. The works,
letters, and sayings of the man or name of
my choice were conned over during hours
of musing, brooding and reverie, until at
length, and often suddenly, the spirit emerged
from his obscurity, the name became a man,
the portrait a face, the table-talk vocal,
and the shade distinct to vision as a familiar
friend.

As years rolled on I increased the ghost
population with less and less trouble
continually. The ghosts became in time numerous
enough to fill the metropolis pretty well
of themselves, and if a liberal publisher
should undertake the work, I might now
prove an efficient contributor to the pages of
the London Ghost Directory.

London became to me nobly haunted by
grand ghosts. In St. Martin's Street,
Leicester Square, Sir Isaac Newton used to
come out of the door of his house upon me in
a way which stopped my breath. From the
very house in the Strand where Messrs.
Warren and Russell sold blacking, my imagination
having become full of the greatness of
the past, saw issuing the daily procession of
the Lord Chancellor Bacon on his way to his
court at Westminster. Hogarth and
Reynolds, the painters, met me daily in Leicester
Square. When I went into Fleet Street I
had to wait to catch an opportunity of
slipping past the huge and shuffling bulk of
Dr. Samuel Johnson. In Queen's Square
Place, and in York Street, Westminster, I
stopped to allow a handsome man in the
garb of a Puritan to pass, whose eyes were
blind, though bright, and who is well known
in the neighbourhood as Mr. John Milton.
At this spot, too, an old man with long white
hair used to come trotting along and smiling
to himself; his name, Mr. Jeremy
Bentham. The great of London all live for
me where they formerly lived. I once paid a
visit to St. Saviour's graveyard, Southwark,
and saw Mr. William Shakespeare with a
mournful pallor on his face as he walked
away from his last look at the lowered coffin
of his brother. His Highness Oliver Cromwell
has frequently passed me in Whitehall.

I once entered the residence of Newton
and found my way into the observatory, a
small square room on the roof of the house;
but, instead of seeing Newton, I saw a cobbler
mending shoes where Newton had studied
the stars! The small fire-place is perhaps
the very one which the absent philosopher
asked his servant to shift further away from
him, as it made him too hot. The broad
ample, wooden staircase, of the sort by which
our ancestors secured good ventilation, the
large and lofty rooms, and the size of the
mansion, show that Newton was lodged, as
the admirers of his genius would wish, in a
healthy home in the centre of civilisation,
yet near the open fields, and in a good street
leading into a new square. Here he reached
a green old age. Around this house I have
often seen a young printer from America,
watching and waiting, in hopes to get a
glimpse of the great old man; but, Benjamin
Franklin never saw more than the outside of
this house. After the death of Newton, a
proposal was made to preserve his residence
as a national monument of his genius.
Musical bells were to chime the hours from his
observatory. Although this was not done by
his countrymen, many statues, casts, portraits
and engravings have preserved his features
and his costume; and the human race have
prepared his best monument by adopting his
interpretation of the Universe. His house is
a relic of one of the greatest manifestations
of humanity, and the preservation of it
would have a tendency towards the elevation
of unborn generations. In this
house resided one of those sublime spirits
whose influences are eras of light and beneficence
in the darkness of time and life. Just
because Newton has enwrought his thoughts
into the universe, and identified his genius
with the stars, ought his countrymen to
localise him, and make a house of brick and
wood a memorial of him. Eating, drinking,
sleeping, waking, going out, coming in, sick,
well, happy, miserable, his mind clouded by
suspicion, distorted by anger, and once at
least morbidly diseased, if not in a state of
aberration, in this house in St. Martin's Street,
Leicester Square, lived and worked a man
with a full share of human infirmities, whose
spirit, nevertheless, was bright enough to
throw an abiding radiance over nature.

Newton lived within a furlong of the house
in which Bacon was born, celebrated, and
disgraced. York Gate, which is still visible
from the Strand, and conspicuous from the
steamer-barges at Hungerford Bridge, marks
the site of York House, in which Francis
Bacon was born, where he resided when he
published his Organum; where he celebrated
his birthday at the zenith of his success;
where philosophers thronged to congratulate
him on his great work, and lawyers and
courtiers on his exalted station; and where
the blackness of shame fell upon him, and he
signed his confession as a bribed judge to
prevent his exposure as something worse.
There is not, connected with the biography
of genius, a more solemn spot than the
vicinity of York Gate, near the Strand. It
was the scene of one of the most mournful
tragedies in the moral life of the human race.
There is an interest here surpassing aught
that belongs to the homes of Newton, Milton,
or Cromwell; the cottage in which Shakespeare