was born; or the cottage in which
Burns died. There is a mournfulness of local
association connected with the site of York
House, far surpassing in deep sadness
anything which invests the dungeon of Tasso;—in
fact, I submit, the most painfully suggestive
spot belonging to the history of science and
letters is the scene of the transactions which
occasioned the truest lines ever written about
Lord Bacon:

        If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined
        The greatest, brightest, meanest of mankind.

York House was one of a series of
mansions on the north bank of the Thames, which
were occupied by the greatest nobles of
England in the days when their mansions were
the chief haunts of history and civilisation.
Westward, the next to it, was Hungerford
House, an aristocratic name which has not
figured in history since the Civil Wars.
Northumberland House, which still stands
about a hundred yards off, was, in the days
of Bacon occupied by an earl (son of the
poet Earl of Surrey), one of the strangest
personages that ever lived, and in it occurred
many mysterious interviews connected with
the murder by poison of Sir Thomas Overbury.
The royal favourite, Carr, Earl of
Somerset, and his beautiful and fiend-like
countess, secretly met in Northumberland
House the dreadful professors of the poisoning
art, while their victim was wasting away
in the Tower. A little further on, south and
west, beyond the bend of the river, lay the
royal towers of the Whitehall of Wolsey and
the Tudors and Stuarts. The view was shut
in by the Chapel of St. Stephen's and the
spires of the Hall and the Abbey of
Westminster. A ferry conveyed passengers across
from Palace Yard and the Starchamber, to a
landing-place before the Church and Palace
of Lambeth. Open fields and gardens clothed
in green the south side of the Thames.

To return to York House. Durham House
was its eastern neighbour. About twenty years
before Lord Bacon occupied York House as
a Lord Chancellor, Sir Walter Raleigh
resided in Durham House, and wrote and
smoked in rooms which overlooked the river
and the fields. It may have been here that
his ignorant page was struck with horror at
seeing smoke issuing from the mouth of his
master. Before Durham House, Richard
Williams, an ancestor of Oliver Cromwell,
distinguished himself in a grand tournament
in presence of Henry the Eighth, who
exclaimed to Richard Williams or Cromwell in
his delight—"Hitherto thou hast been my
Dick; henceforth thou shalt be my diamond;"
throwing him a ring still painted on
the fore jambe of the demi-lion on the coats
of arms of the Cromwells. Looking eastwards
were more mansions, full of more associations
than I can stop to enumerate, although I
cannot omit to name the house of the Lord
Southampton of Shakespeare, or the residence
of the Essex of Elizabeth, or the Arundel
House of the Arundel of the Marbles, or Old
Somerset House, or the Temple, or the square
half spire which surmounted Old St. Paul's.
Gay, in his Trivia, notices with a poet's
regrets the changes in the Strand.

     Behold that narrow street, which steep descends,
     Whose building to the slimy shore extends;
     Here Arundel's famed structure rear'd its fame;
     The street alone retains the empty name.
     Where Titian's glowing paint the canvass warm'd,
     And Raphael's fair design with judgment charm'd,
     There hangs the bellman's song; and, pasted here,
     The colour'd prints of Oberton appear.
     Where statues breathed the work of Phidias' hands,
     A wooden pump or lonely watchhouse stands.
     There Essex's stately pile adorn'd the shore,
     There Cecil's, Bedford's, Villiers',—now no more.

Villiers' means York House, which, after
the downfall of Lord Bacon, passed into the
possession of the magnificent favourite of the
First James and the First Charles.

The great historical changes of England
have all shown themselves in these
mansions. Durham House and York House were
the town residences of the proud prelates
(the Bishops of Durham, the Archbishops of
York, who prior to the Reformation
outshone the nobles and ruled the kings), of
whom Cardinal Wolsey was the last and
most memorable specimen, and the scene of
whose splendours was the neighbouring palace
at Whitehall. At the Reformation, the king
seized the palace of the cardinal, and the
lord keepers, the chiefs of the lay lawyers,
obtained possession of the palace of the
Archbishops of York. In the days of Henry the
Eighth and his daughter Elizabeth, the
civilisation of England among the nobles, the
courtiers, the prelates and lawyers in literature,
philosophy, and politics, was Italian.
Fashion was as Italian as possible. From
London Bridge to Lambeth Ferry the Thames
wore an Italian look. Old London Bridge
had houses on it overhanging the river, as
the Venetian palaces overhang the canals.
Every great mansion had its watergate, and
every nobleman had his boats and barges
like gondolas, with watermen in his livery
like gondoliers.

It is hard to say whether the reader who
is familiar with the spot, or the reader who
has never seen it, will have most difficulty in
realising the scene where Francis Bacon was
born, where he played as a boy, where he
lived as lord chancellor, and where he was
renowned and ruined. The reader familiar
with the place has to demolish all the bridges
in sight, to spread gardens with southern
aspects from the mansions to the pebbly
margins innocent of slime, to make the waters
clean and bright, to substitute for the penny
steamers, royal and lordly barges; and on
the south bank, sweeping away dark masses
of breweries, wharfs and warehouses,
display green fields and trees towards the