But in these days it was otherwise; and they who, in the necessities of the times, did what they could to advance the interest of the belles lettres, deserve not to be forgotten.

It is with a feeling of sickness that we open the pages of this great Wit’s ‘Diary,’ and attempt to peruse the sentences in which the most grasping selfishness is displayed.  We follow him to Leicester House, that ancient tenement—­(wherefore pulled down, except to erect on its former site the narrowest of streets, does not appear):  that former home of the Sydneys had not always been polluted by the dissolute, heartless clique who composed the court of Frederick, Prince of Wales.  Its chambers had once been traversed by Henry Sydney, by Algernon, his brother.  It was their home—­their father, Robert Sydney, Earl of Leicester, having lived there.  The lovely Dorothy Sydney, Waller’s Saccharissa, once, in all purity and grace, had danced in that gallery where the vulgar, brazen Lady Middlesex, and her compliant lord, afterwards flattered the weakest of princes, Frederick.  In old times Leicester House had stood on Lammas land—­land in the spirit of the old charities, open to the poor after Lammas-tide; and even ’the Right Hon. the Earl of Leicester’—­as an old document hath it—­was obliged, if he chose to turn out his cows or horses on that appropriated land, to pay a rent for it to the overseers of St. Martin’s parish, then really ’in the fields.’  And here this nobleman not only dwelt in all state himself, but let, or lent his house to persons whose memory seems to hallow even Leicester Fields.  Elizabeth of Bohemia, after what was to her indeed ‘life’s fitful fever,’ died at Leicester House.  It became then, temporarily, the abode of ambassadors.  Colbert, in the time of Charles II., occupied the place; Prince Eugene, in 1712, held his residence here; and the rough soldier, famous for all absence of tact—­brave, loyal-hearted, and coarse—­lingered at Leicester House in hopes of obstructing the peace between England and France.

All that was good and great fled for ever from Leicester House at the instant that George II., when Prince of Wales, was driven by his royal father from St. James’s, and took up his abode in it until the death of George I. The once honoured home of the Sydneys henceforth becomes loathsome in a moral sense.  Here William, Duke of Cumberland—­the hero, as court flatterers called him—­the butcher, as the poor Jacobite designated him—­of Culloden, first saw the light.  Peace and respectability then dignified the old house for ever.  Prince Frederick was its next inmate:  here the Princess of Wales, the mother of George III., had her lying-in, and her royal husband held his public tables; and at these and in every assembly, as well as in private, one figure is conspicuous.