of Thackeray; and finally ends in the Queen's Bench Prison, whence in time he passes to Calais or Boulogne as Prince Louis Napoleon and Brummell did on their errands.

A reference to the Coburg Theatre (in "The Fashionable Authoress ") obviously requires the further statement that it was situated in the Waterloo Bridge Road, was opened in 1818, and named after Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg who laid the foundation stone, and is now replaced by the Victoria Music Hall.

I will close this section of my subject by an extract from the last of "Character Sketches," that dealing with "The Artists," because it gives a picture of that quarter of the Town, which was once, before Chelsea became its Mecca, the chosen rendezvous of the arts:

"It is confidently stated that there was once a time when the quarter of Soho was thronged by the fashion of London. Many wide streets are there in the neighbourhood, stretching cheerfully towards Middlesex Hospital in the north, bounded by Dean Street in the west, where the lords and ladies of William's time used to dwell, till, in Queen Anne's time, Bloomsbury put Soho out of fashion, and Great Russell Street became the pink of the mode.

"Both these quarters of the town have submitted to the awful rule of nature, and are now to be seen undergoing the dire process of decay. Fashion has deserted Soho, and left her in her gaunt, lonely, old age. The houses have a most dingy, mouldy, dowager look. No more beaux, in mighty periwigs, ride by in gilded clattering coaches; no more lacqueys accompany them, bearing torches, and shouting for pre

cedence. A solitary policeman paces these solitary streets-the only dandy in the neighbourhood. You hear the milk-man yelling his milk with a startling distinctness, and the clack of a servant girl's pattens sets people a-staring from the windows.

"With Bloomsbury we have here nothing to do; but as genteel stock-brokers inhabit the neighbourhood of Regent's Park-as lawyers have taken possession of Russell Square-so artists have seized upon the desolate quarter of Soho. They are to be found in great numbers in Berners Street. Up to the present time, naturalists have never been able to account for this mystery of their residence. What has the painter to do with Middlesex Hospital? He is to be found in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. And why? Philosophy cannot tell, any more than why milk is found in a cocoa-nut.

"Look at Newman Street. Has earth, in any dismal corner of her great round face, a spot more desperately gloomy? The windows are spotted with wafers, holding up ghastly bills, that tell you the house is "To let." Nobody walks there-not even an old clothesman; the first inhabitated house has bars to the window, and bears the name of "Ahasuerus, officer to the Sheriff of Middlesex,” and here, above all places, must painters take up their quarters-day by day must these reckless people pass Ahasuerus's treble gate. . . The street begins with a bailiff's, and ends with a hospital. The ground floors of the houses where painters live are mostly make-believe shops, black empty warehouses, containing fabulous goods. There is a sedan chair opposite a house in Rathbone Place, that I have my

self seen every day for forty-three years. The house has commonly a huge India-rubber-coloured door, with a couple of glistening brass plates, and bells. A portrait painter lives on the first floor; a great historical genius inhabits the second.* Remark the first floor's middle drawing-room window; it is four feet higher than its two companions, and has taken a fancy to peep into the second-floor front. So much for the outward appearance of their habitations, and for the quarters in which they commonly dwell. They seem to love solitude, and their mighty spirits rejoice in vastness and gloomy ruin."

One could not, I think, find a more life-like picture of this locality at the period in which Thackeray wrote, the earlier quarter of the nineteenth century, than this passage in which the faded glories of old Soho are depicted with so sure a touch.

* Was Thackeray thinking of R. B. Haydon, who occupied a second floor in Great Marlborough Street?

ΧΙ

MISCELLANIES (CONTINUED)

i

A LITTLE DINNER AT TIMMINS'S

THE few references to London in this amusing little story may be taken together with those in "The Bedford Row Conspiracy," for, truth to tell, there is little enough in the former of these tales-certainly not enough to make a show, without the help of its companion. Mr. and Mrs. Fitzroy Timmins live in Lilliput Street, "that neat little street which runs at right angles with the Park and Brobdingnag Gardens." It is, we are told, a very genteel neighbourhood, and the Timmins are of a good family, but we know they are "struggling," as it is called, and Timmins has all his work cut out at his chambers in Figtree Court, to make both ends meet. Where is Lilliput Gardens? Where is Brobdingnag Gardens where Sir Thomas and Lady Kicklebury live, and Mr. John Rowdy, of the firm of Stumpy, Rowdy and Co., of Lombard Street? Where, enfin, is Belgravine Place, where Mr. Topham Sawyer, M.P., resides? All these were guests, as was Mr. Grumpley, of Gloucester Place-but that quarter we all know. No, it is the original of Lilliput Street that one would like to identify. The Timmins's purse would

hardly allow them to live in Mayfair; Belgravia can scarcely be regarded as abutting on the Park. Certainly Brobdingnag Gardens might be Kensington Palace Gardens whose houses are large enough for such a title; but would this be sufficiently near the Park, to hold water, so to speak? The mention of Gloucester Place may indicate that Thackeray had in his mind that region; and if so Brobdingnag Gardens may stand for Portman Square, and Lilliput Street for one of the adjoining thoroughfares-Can it be Baker Street-the Baker Street which so often enters into Thackeray's writing the Baker Street about which he is so ironically respectful? I like to think that it was Baker Street, and that the lilliputian name is given it on the lucus a non lucendo principle.

In this short tale we get this kind of mystifying topography except for Figtree Court where we have already met Mr. Brown's nephew, and Gloucester Place in one of whose houses (No. 34) it is pleasant to remember that, in 1823, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Moore, Lamb, Mary Lamb, and Rogers all sat down, on a red-letter day indeed, to dinner, with their host, Thomas Monkhouse, M.P. No wonder, Moore, recording the circumstance, could write "I dined in Parnassus: half the poetry of England constellated in Gloucester Place."

Timmins's club was the Megatherium. Again which of London's innumerable (even at that date) clubs was it? It figures elsewhere in Thackeray's writings, in the "Book of Snobs"; in the "Roundabout Papers." Even a process of elimination can hardly be successful here. The Reform he calls the Reform