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

monarchy was successfully planned in 1660 in the secret conferences of General Monk.

It is just beyond the now melancholy site of Northumberland House that we enter upon what is still called "the Strand." If we could linger, as we might in the early morning, when there would be no great traffic to hinder us, we should see that, even now, the great street is far from unpicturesque. Its houses, projecting, receding, still ornamented here and there with bow-windows, sometimes with a little sculpture or pargetting work, present a very broken outline to the sky; and, at the end, in the blue haze which is so beautiful on a fine day in London, rises the Flemishlooking steeple of St. Mary le Strand with the light streaming through its open pillars.

The Strand palaces are gone now. In Italian cities, which love their reminiscences and guard them, their sites would be marked by inscribed tablets let into the later houses. This is not the way with Englishmen ; yet, even in England, they have their own commemoration, and in the Strand the old houses and the old residents have their record in the names of the adjoining streets on either side the way. Gay, calling upon his friend Fortescue to walk west with him from Temple Bar, thus alludes to them :

"Come, Fortescue, sincere, experienced friend,
Thy briefs, thy deeds, and e'en thy fees suspend;
Come, let us leave the Temple's silent walls;
Me business to my distant lodging calls;
Through the long Strand together let us stray.
With thee conversing, I forget the way.
Behold that narrow street which steep descends,
Whose building to the slimy shore extends;
Here Arundel's famed structure rear'd its frame,
The street alone retains the empty name.

Where Titian's glowing paint the canvas warm'd,
And Raphael's fair design with judgment charm'd,
Now hangs the bellman's song, and pasted here
The colour'd prints of Overton appear.

Where statues breathed, the works of Phidias' hands,
A wooden pump, or lonely watchhouse stands.
There Essex' stately pile adorn'd the shore,

There Cecil's, Bedford's, Villiers's,- -now no more."

Charing Cross Railway Station, in front of which a copy of the ancient Cross of Queen Eleanor has been recently erected by E. Barry, occupies the site of the mansion of Sir Edward Hungerford (created Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Charles II.), which was burnt in April, 1669. On the ground thus accidentally cleared Hungerford Market was erected, which was decorated with a bust of Sir Edward Hungerford "the Spendthrift," who died in 1711, and was represented here in the wig for which he gave 500 guineas. The Hungerford Suspension Bridge which here crossed the Thames now spans the tremendous chasm beneath St. Vincent's Rocks at Clifton.

We must turn to the right, immediately beyond the station, to visit the remnants of the famous palace known as York House. The Archbishops of York had been without any town house after York Place, now Whitehall, was taken away from them by Wolsey, and this site, previously occupied by the Inn of the Bishops of Norwich, was given to them by Mary. The Archbishops, however, scarcely ever lived here. They let it to the Lords Keepers of the Great Seal, and thus it was that Sir Nicholas Bacon came to reside at York House, and that his son, the great Lord Bacon, was born here in 1560. He in his turn lived here as Chancellor, and was greatly attached to the place; for when the Duke

of Lennox wished him to sell his interest in it, he answered, "For this you will pardon me, York House is the house where my father died, and where I first breathed, and there I will yield my last breath, please God and the king.”

"Lord Bacon being in Yorke house garden, looking on fishers, as they were throwing their nett, asked them what they would take for their draught; they answered so much: his lordship would offer them no more but so much. They drew up their nett, and it were only 2 or 3 little fishes. His lordship then told them, it had been better for them to have taken his offer. They replied, they hoped to have had a better draught; but, said his lordship, Hope is a good breakfast, but an ill supper.”—Aubrey's Lives.

Steenie, James I.'s Duke of Buckingham, obtained York Place by exchange, and formed plans for sumptuously rebuilding it, but only the Watergate was completely carried out to show how great were his intentions.

"There was a costly magnificence in the fêtes at York House, the residence of Buckingham, of which few but curious researchers are aware; they eclipsed the splendours of the French Court; for Bassompierre, in one of his despatches, declares that he never witnessed similar magnificence. He describes the vaulted apartments, the ballets at supper, which were proceeding between the services, with various representations, theatrical changes, and those of the tables, and the music; the duke's own contrivance, to prevent the inconvenience of pressure, by having a turning door like that of the monasteries, which admitted only one person at a time."— D'Israeli. Curiosities of Literature.

The Parliament gave the house to their General, Fairfax, but when his daughter married George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, it brought the property back into that family. Cromwell was exceedingly angry at this marriage. The Duke was permitted to reside at York House with his wife, but on his venturing to go without leave to Cobham to visit his sister, he was