Throughout the pages of "The Four Georges " and "The English Humourists" we obtain, as it were, a birds-eye view of the London of that decorative period-the eighteenth century, which will help to illustrate the more special allusions to it, which are to be found in the four novels dealing with that particular time, into whose pages we have now to look.

II

ESMOND

THE history of Henry Esmond practically begins in the year 1691 when the boy was twelve years old, living at Castlewood in Hampshire, and closes with that memorable day in the year 1714, when Queen Anne died, and the hopes of her brother, The Old Pretender, or James III., which you will, were extinguished with the trumpet blast that heralded the unopposed accession of George I. The glimpses of London which we get in this book, show us the city as it was at the close of the seventeenth and commencement of the eighteenth, century. It is the London of the Coffee-Houses that is pictured for us; the London of Addison and Steele and Swift, when Kensington Gravel Pits and far-thrown Chelsea were suburbs, and Kensington Palace was only reached by a road dangerous alike for its ruts and its highwaymen. It was, besides, a London of transition: the reign of Anne was technically a Stuart reign, but it was that of William III. and Mary, which practically closed the Stuart dynasty. Anne's rule really stands alone between two periods opposed in almost all essentials. Hers was that Augustan era, notable for its great men in statecraft, politics, arms, literature, and science, which divided the gay insouciant period of Charles II.'s rule, and the sombre tyranny of his

brother, from the rather bourgeois tendencies which came in under the Georges with their curious taste in foods and favourites. It is one of the notable features of Esmond, that without apparently over-much effort it succeeds in conveying a complete and masterly picture of the time. It has been objected that the book bears over much evidence of being documenté, but this is, I think, to judge too critically by the light of the remarkable result produced. As a matter of fact it is difficult, on examination, to find anything in it which may be legitimately regarded as property introduced for the sake of building up a picture of the manners and customs of the time. This picture is rather conveyed by natural and what appear to be inevitable, situations and effects. One sees at once how thoroughly Thackeray must have saturated himself in the whole history of the period, before setting down to place his characters among scenes which he knew so well that he once projected a history of Anne's reign destined to be, he once said, his greatest work.

Here, however, no such canvas, as the writer thought of working on, demands our attention, but only that relatively small portion of it in which he touches on London in the book under consideration. The first mention we have of the Capital is in Chapter III., when Lord Castlewood comes to London, to his lodging near Covent Garden,* from his ancestral home in Hampshire, and sends his servant to fetch Henry Esmond from the care of old Mr. Pastoureau at Ealing. The boy, we are told, "remembered to

*I like to think that this lodging still exists in the beautiful old house, with its panelled rooms, No. 13 York Street, where the Spectator appropriately has now its headquarters.

have lived in another place a short time before, near to London, too, amongst looms and spinning-wheels, and a great deal of psalm-singing and church-going, and a whole colony of Frenchmen." Spitalfields was the scene of these childish memories; the Spitalfields famous as the spot where these emigrants, banished from France on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, had settled and set up that manufacture of silk with which the place is identified, and where even to-day one may trace in certain existing names, the former inhabitants whose splendid zeal and uncompromising opposition led them to confer incalculable benefits on an alien land. It is pleasant to be able to associate with the Romillys and Laboucheres, the Ligoniers and the Barrés, the figure of young Esmond living in these precincts with his Uncle George who told him that "his father was a captain, and his mother was an angel." It was back to London from Ealing that the boy was now brought, and before setting out for Castlewood, spent some happy days exploring the great city. He was taken to the play" in a house a thousand times greater and finer than the booth at Ealing Fair," probably the Drury Lane Theatre, which had been rebuilt by Wren and opened in 1674, after the destruction of the first house by fire. It was then under the management of Rich, satirised by Hogarth in a famous print. On another day young Esmond enjoyed the experience of being rowed on the river, and of seeing London Bridge, then crowded with houses and booksellers' shops and "looking like a street "; and yet another expedition took him, under the care of Monsieur Blaise, to the Tower "with the armour and the

great lions and bears in the moat." That once famous menagerie existed down to the time of William IV; and as early as the reign of Henry I. lions and leopards had been kept there. At the time of Esmond's visit, the lions were named after the reigning monarch. One of the "vulgar errors" of the time was that when the sovereign died the lion bearing his name died also, a superstition amusingly alluded to by Addison in No. 47 of "The Freeholder."

Full of these sights Harry Esmond accompanied Lord Castlewood back to the country, to play with Beatrix and to learn something of men and things from Father Holt. Nor does his history touch London again until he was ready to go to Cambridge, on which occasion the new Lord Castlewood (for Harry's earlier patron had been wounded to death at The Boyne, it will be remembered) accompanied him, being desirous of once again visiting the old haunts of his youth. Their way lay through London "where my Lord Viscount would also have Harry stay a few days to show him the pleasures of the town." One of their visits was to the Lady Dowager's home at Chelsey near London, a handsome new house with a garden behind it, and facing the river, always a bright and animated sight with its swarms of sailors, barges, and wherries." In a plan of Chelsea dated 1664, you may see some of those mansions, one of which may have been in Thackeray's eye as the retreat to which the Dowager had retired from Castlewood and from that residence in Lincoln's Inn Fields, "nigh to the Duke's Theatre and to the Portugal Ambassador's chapel," and my Lord Duke of Newcastle's abode, where she had once kept up no

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