meaning the groome-porter. Upon which it was worth observing how far they are come from taking the reprehensions of a bishop seriously, that they all laugh in the chapel when he reflected on their ill actions and courses. He did much press us to joy in these publick days of joy, and to hospitality. But one that stood by whispered in my ear, that the bishop himself do not spend one groate to the poor himself. The sermon done, a good anthem followed with violls, and the King come down to receive the sacrament.

"1662-3-February 1st.-This day Creed and I walking in White Hall did see the King coming privately from my Lady Castlemaine's; which is a poor thing for a Prince to do: and so I expressed my sense of it to Creed in terms which I should not have done, but that I believe he is trusty in that point."

The court of James II. is hardly worth mention. It lasted less than four years, and was as dull as himself. The most remarkable circumstance attending it was the sight of friars and confessors, and the brief restoration of Popery. Waller, too, was once seen there; the fourth court of his visiting. There was a poetess also, who appears to have been attached by regard as well as office to the court of James-Anne Kingsmill, better known by her subsequent title of Countess of Winchilsea. The attachment was most probably one of feeling only and good-nature, for she had no bigotry of any sort. Dryden, furthermore, was laureate to King James; and in a fit of politic, perhaps real, regret, turned round upon the late court in his famous comparison of it with its prede

cessor.

James fled from England in December, 1688, and the history of Whitehall terminates with its conflagration, ten years afterwards.

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CHAP. XII.

St. James's Park and its Associations. - Unhealthiness of the Place and Neighbourhood.-Leper Hospital of St. James. Henry the Eighth builds St. James's Palace and the Tilt Yard. - Original State and Progressive Character of the Park. - Charles the First. Cromwell. - Charles the Second; his Walks, Amusements, and Mistresses. The Mulberry Gardens. Swift, Prior, Richardson, Beau Tibbs, Soldiers, and Syllabubs. Character of the Park at present. - St. James's Palace during the Reigns of the Stuarts and two first Georges. -Anecdotes of Lord Craven and Prince George of Denmark. Characters of Queen Anne and of George the First and Second. - George the First and his Carp. - Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Sack of Wheat.- Horace Walpole's Portrait of George the First. - The Mistresses of that King, and of his Son. - Mistake of Lord Chesterfield. Queen Caroline's Ladies in Waiting. Miss Bellenden and the Guineas. - George the Second's Rupture with his Father, and with Character of that Son. - Buckingham House. - Sheffield and his Duchess.- Character of Queen Charlotte.- Advantages of Queen Victoria over her predecessors.

his Son.

T. JAMES'S PARK is associated in contemporary minds with nothing but amusing recollections of bands of music, marching soldiers, maid-servants and children, drinkings of "milk from the cow," the hoop-petticoats of the court-days of George

the Third, and fading images of

passages in novels, or of shabby-genteel debtors sitting lounging on the benches. A little further back in point of time we see a novelist himself, Richardson, walking in it, with other invalids, for his health; then Swift crossing it from Suffolk Street in his way to Chelsea, or thinking of the Spectator and Rosamond's Pond; then the gallants of the time of Charles the Second, with Charles himself

feeding his ducks and playing at mall; then his unhappy father led through it from St. James's Palace on his way to the scaffold at Whitehall; and then the chivalresque sports of the Tudors in the famous tilt-yard, which occupied the site of the Horse Guards. To all these points

we shall return for the purpose of entering into a few particulars; but as geographers begin their accounts of a place with the soil, we shall first make a few remarks of a like nature.

The site of this park, which must always have been low and wet, is said in the days before the Conquest to have been a swamp. Yet so little understood, not only at that time but at any time till within these few years, were those vitalest arts of life which have been disclosed to us by the Southwood Smiths and others, that the good citizens of London in those days built a hospital upon it for lepers (by way of purifying their skins), and people of rank and fashion have been clustering about it more and more ever since, especially of late years. "If a merry-meeting is to be wished," says the man in Shakspeare, may God prohibit it." If our health is to be injured while in town by luxury and late nights, say the men of state and Parliament, let us all go and make it worse in the bad air of Belgravia. Nay, let us sit with our feet in the water, while in Parliament itself, and then let us aggravate our agues in Pimlico and the park. There is no use in mincing the matter, even though the property of a great lord be doubled by the mistake. The fashionable world should have stuck to Marylebone and the good old dry parts of the metropolis, or gone up hill to Kensington gravel-pits, or into any other wholesome quarter of the town or suburbs, rather than have descended to the water-side, and built in the mush of Pimlico. Building and house-warming doubtless make a difference; and wealth has the usual advantages compared with

poverty but the malaria is not done away. A professional authority on the subject gave the warning five and twenty years ago in the Edinburgh Review; but what are warnings to house-building and fashion? "It is not suspected," he says (vol. xxxvi. p. 341.) "that St. James's Park is a perpetual source of malaria, producing frequent intermittents, autumnal dysenteries, and various derangements of health, in all the inhabitants who are subject to its influence. The cause being unsuspected, the evil is endured, and no further inquiries are made." The malaria (he tells us in another passage of the same article) spreads even to Bridge Street and Whitehall. Nay, in making use of the most delicate miasmometer (if we may coin such a word) that we ever possessed, an officer who had suffered at Walcheren, we have found it reaching up to St. James's Street even to Bruton Street, although the rise of ground is here considerable, and the whole space from the nearest water is crowded with houses."

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This statement, corroborated as it is by the obvious nature of the soil and air in the park, where the people to any eye coming from higher ground seem walking about only in a thinner kind of water,—a perpetual haze and mugginess, ought to settle the question respecting the doom of Buckingham Palace. Her Majesty, whose life and comfort are precious to her subjects, should have her town residence in quite another sort of place. Almost everything indeed, artificial as well as natural, conspires to render the spot unwholesome. See what the royal lungs receive on all sides of the present abode whichever way the windows are opened. In front of it is the steam of the mushy ground and the canal; on the left comes draining down the wet of Constitution Hill; and on the right and at the back are the vapours of the river and the pestilential smokes of the manufactories. What an air in which to set forth the colours of the royal flag and

refresh the anxieties of the owner! We never look down on the flag from Piccadilly, but we long to see it announcing the royal presence on higher ground and in a healthy breeze.

The Leper Hospital, being the ancientest known domicile in the spot before us, stood on the site of the present St. James's Palace; so that where state and fashion have congregated, and blooming beauties come laughing through the trees, was once heard the dismal sound of the "cup and clapper," which solicited charity for the most revolting of diseases. The spot was probably selected for the hospital, not only as being at the greatest convenient distance from the habitations of the good citizens its founders (lepers being always put as far as possible out of the way), but because it suggested itself to the imagination as possessed of an analogous dreariness and squalidity. Unfavourable circumstances in those days were only thought fit for one another, not for the superinduction of favourable ones. The lunatic was to be exasperated by whips and dark-keeping, and the leper thrust into the ditch. The world had not yet found out that light, cleanliness, and consolation were good for all. Imagine this" lake of the dismal swamp," now St. James's Park, with not another house nearer to it than the walls at Ludgate, presenting to the timid eyes of the Sunday pedestrian its lonely spital, which at once attracted his charity and repelled his presence (for leprosy was thought infectious), the wind sighing through the trees, and the rain mingling with the pestilential-looking mud.

The endowment of St. James's Hospital is said to have been originally for women only, fourteen in number, to whom were subsequently added eight brethren "to administer divine service." They were probably, however, in a good condition of life-"leper ladies," as an old poem styles the companions of Cressida; but ladies, according