pleasure-grounds, has passed away in the present century, and the buildings known as Carlton Gardens, alone point out the site. Carlton House was purchased of the Earl of Burlington, by Frederick Prince of Wales, in 1732, and was the occasional residence of that Prince. It was here that, in 1751, he contracted the illness which was the immediate cause of his death. He had been unwell for some time with a pleurisy, but, a few days before his end, was sufficiently recovered to be able to attend the King to the House of Lords. On his return, though much heated, he was imprudent enough to change his clothes for a light unaired dress, in which, on a very inclement day, he travelled to Kew. In the evening he returned to Carlton House, and being extremely fatigued, lay down for three hours in a very cold room, that opened on the ground floor into the garden. Lord Egmont remonstrated with him that it was a very dangerous indulgence, but to no purpose. The consequence was a fresh cold, and this produced a return of the illness which proved fatal to him. After the death of Frederick, Carlton House became the residence of his widow, Augusta of Saxe Gotha, mother of George the Third, and the scene in which she carried on her amatory intimacy with the celebrated minister, Lord Bute. "It cannot be denied," says Wraxall, "that Lord Bute enjoyed a higher place in the favour of the Princess, if not in her affections, than seemed compatible with strict propriety. His visits to Carlton House (which were VOL. I. L always performed in the evening), and the precautions taken to conceal his arrival, awakened suspicion. He commonly made use on those occasions of the chair and the chairmen of Miss Vansittart, a lady who held a distinguished place in her royal highness's notice; the curtains of the chair were also drawn."* Horace Walpole observes, "I am as much convinced of an amorous connection between Lord Bute and the Princess as if I had seen them together." Carlton House subsequently became the residence of George the Fourth when Prince of Wales, and, during his regency, it was in its gorgeous saloons that the royal voluptuary held his gay revels. The pillars which formed the portico of Carlton House are now attached to the centre of that national disgrace, the National Gallery, in Trafalgar Square. We are enabled to record a few more names of interest in connection with Pall Mall. In 1733, we find the unfortunate Charles Ratcliffe,--brother of the young Earl of Derwentwater who was executed in 1716,-residing at a Mr. John's in Pall Mall.† He had with difficulty contrived to effect his escape from the Tower in 1716, and, after residing for some time on the continent, returned to London, where he was allowed to remain unmolested. In 1745 he prepared once more to take up arms in the cause of the Stuarts, but, being captured at sea on board a French vessel laden with ammunition, he was car *Wraxall's "Memoirs of his Own Time." ried to Newgate, and subsequently beheaded on Tower Hill on the 8th of December, 1746. It is to Pall Mall that Fielding conducts Tom Jones and Nightingale, when they are compelled to quit Mrs. Miller's lodgings in Bond Street. Here also resided the celebrated Bubb Dodington, and we can almost fancy him on his way to his fantastic villa at Hammersmith, in his roomy coach, which had probably been his ambassadorial equipage at Madrid, drawn, we are told, "by six fat unwieldy black horses, short-docked, and of colossal dignity."* Lastly, in Pall Mall the charming actress, Mrs. Abingdon, passed the last years of her life. * Cumberland's Memoirs of Himself. ST. JAMES'S PALACE. SITE OF ST. JAMES'S PALACE. -ERECTED BY HENRY THE EIGHTH. THE RESIDENCE OF QUEEN MARY, HENRY PRINCE OF WALES, CHARLES THE FIRST, MARY DE MEDICIS, CHARLES THE SECOND, JAMES THE SECOND, WILLIAM THE THIRD, GEORGE THE FIRST, GEORGE SECOND, AND DAUGHTER. ST. JAMES'S PALACE stands on the site of an hospital, founded before the Norman Conquest, for the reception of "fourteen sisters, maidens, that were leprous, living chastely and honestly," to whom five brethren were afterwards added, for the purpose of performing divine service. In 1532, Henry the Eighth, having taken a fancy to the site, from its vicinity to the Palace of Whitehall, gave, in exchange for the "hospital and fields," Chattisham and other lands in Suffolk; and at the same time settled pensions on the sisterhood, whom he sent forth into the world to seek an asylum elsewhere. "I find," writes Lord Herbert of Cherbury, "that our King, having got York House, now Whitehall, upon the Cardinal's conviction in a præmunire, did newly enlarge and beautify it, buying also the hospital and fields of St. James, and building the palace there. For which purpose, he compounded with the sisters of the house for a pension during their lives."* In the words * Lord Herbert's "Life and Reign of King Henry VIII." DEATH OF QUEEN MARY. 149 of Stow, it was a "goodly manor;" and Holinshed informs us that the King converted it into a "fair mansion and park." Henry commenced building the palace in the same year in which he married Anne Boleyn, and it seems not improbable that he intended it to be the residence of his beautiful consort. On each side of the principal entrance to the palace, facing St. James's Street, may still be seen a small arched door-way, each of which is ornamented by the "love-knot" of Henry the Eighth and the ill-fated Anne Boleyn. In 1559, Queen Mary,-familiar to us from our childhood as "Bloody Mary,"-breathed her last in the palace erected by her father. ""Tis said," writes Bishop Godwin, in his life of Queen Mary, "that in the beginning of her sickness, her friends, supposing King Philip's absence afflicted her, endeavoured by all means to divert her melancholy. But all proved in vain; and the Queen abandoning herself to despair, told them, 'she should die, though they were yet strangers to the cause of her death; but if they would know it hereafter, they must dissect her, and they would find Calais at her heart; intimating that the loss of that place was her death's wound. The death of her father-in-law, Charles the Fifth of Spain, was likewise thought to have considerably augmented her sorrow; so that these things probably hastened her end, and threw her by degrees into a dropsy, which the physicians at first mistook, believing her with child." The circumstance, which,-far more than the ab |