Charter-House Square, which, still intensely respectable, was once eminently fashionable.  At one corner of it is a little recess known as Rutland Square, for on this site once stood the abode of the dukes of that ilk, and near to it is a stately mansion with a high pitched roof which was in days long gone the residence of the Venetian ambassador.  A garden occupies the centre of the square.  Everything is neat, orderly and severely dull, the most dissipated tenants of the square being boarding-house keepers of a highly sedate description.  The secret of all this tremendous respectability is to be found in the contiguity to the Charter-House itself, a portion of whose buildings abut on the square, which, with many of the streets adjoining, belongs to this wealthy institution.  Four years ago the place was so secluded that a stranger to London might have walked around the spot a dozen times without suspecting its existence, and living in one of its comfortable old mansions supposed himself in the cathedral close of a provincial city.  The entrance to the Charter-House itself is under an archway through venerable oaken portals, which are said—­and there seems no reason to question the statement—­to be the identical gates of the monastery which occupied the ground in the time of Henry VIII.  This monastery had been a religious house of the Carthusians.[2] The order first came to England in 1180, and was seated at a place called Witham Priory[3] in Somersetshire, to this day known as Charter-House Witham.  There Henry II. founded and endowed a monastery.  The London branch of the establishment at Witham was founded by Sir Walter de Manni, seigneur de Manni in Cambrai, France, who was made a knight of the Garter by Edward III., in reward for gallant services.  Manni founded the house in pious commemoration of a decimating pestilence, on which occasion not fewer than fifty thousand persons are said to have been buried within the thirteen acres which he bought and enclosed, and a gentle eminence known as the “hill” in the play-ground, separating what was called “Upper Green” from “Under Green,” is said to owe its shape to the thousands of bodies buried there.  Manni died in 1371:  his funeral was conducted with the utmost pomp, and attended by the king and the princes of the blood.

A hundred and fifty years rolled on without aught very momentous to interrupt the daily routine of the monks of Charter-House, who, had there not been a woman in the case, might possibly be the occupants of the ground to this day.  When, however, Henry’s fancy for Anne Boleyn led him to look with favor on the Reformation, the Charter-House, in common with other such establishments, came in for an ample share of Thomas Cromwell’s scrutinizing inquiries.  And a sad fate its occupants had.  Required to take the oath of allegiance to Henry VIII., they refused.  Froude, who gives them an extended notice, says:  “In general, the house was perhaps the best ordered in England.  The hospitality was well