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close of his long life. Their marriage was not acknowledged till the year 1735, but, as many as twelve years previous to its announcement, we find Lord Peterborough horse-whipping a foreign singer, Senescino, at a rehearsal, for some offence which he had given to his future Countess.* Of the year in which they were married we have no record; indeed, it was only when broken down by disease, and when harassed by her repeated refusals to live under the same roof with him, unless be acknowledged her as his wife, that Lord Peterborough was induced to divulge his secret to the world. Even when he proclaimed his weakness, it was in a very characteristic manner. He went one evening to the rooms at Bath, where a servant had previously received orders to exclaim in a distinct and audible voice, "Lady Peterborough's carriage waits." Every lady of rank and fashion, we are told, immediately rose, and offered their congratulations to the new Countess. Gay, in his "Epistle to William Pulteney," has celebrated the vocal powers of the beautiful songstress :

O soothe me with some soft Italian air,
Let harmony compose my tortured ear;
When Anastasia's voice commands the strain,
The melting warble thrills through every vein;
Thought stands suspended, silence pleased attends,
While in her notes the heavenly choir descends.

It is in this square that Smollet makes Matthew Bramble and his sister, with Humphrey Clinker and Winifred Jenkins, take up their residence.

* Lady M. W. Montagu's Letters.

25

THE GREEN PARK AND HYDE PARK.

THE GREEN PARK.-DUEL BETWEEN THE EARL OF BATH AND LORD HERVEY.-HYDE PARK IN THE REIGNS OF HENRY THE EIGHTH, QUEEN ELIZABETH, QUEEN ANNE, CROMWELL, AND CHARLES THE SECOND.-FAMOUS DUEL BETWEEN LORD MOHUN AND THE DUKE OF HAMILTON.-M'LEAN AND BELCHIER THE HIGHWAYMEN. MYSTERIOUS INCIDENT TO THE DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH.

PREVIOUS to the Restoration, the site of the Green Park was occupied by meadows, and it is to Charles the Second, that the children who fly kites, and the nursery-maids who make love, are indebted for its being converted into an appanage of St. James's Palace. With the exception of its being the scene of a remarkable duel between the celebrated minister Pulteney, afterwards Earl of Bath, and the scarcely less celebrated John, Lord Hervey, I am not aware that the Green Park possesses any particular feature of interest. In 1730, there appeared in print a pamphlet, entitled "Sedition and Defamation Displayed," which the world in general attributed to Lord Hervey, and which contained a violent personal attack on Pulteney. This pamphlet was replied to by the latter, who, believing it to be the production of Lord Hervey, vomited forth an acrimonious attack on its presumed author. Al

luding to the well-known effeminate appearance and habits of Lord Hervey, Pulteney speaks of his opponent as a thing half-man and half-woman, and dwells malignantly on those personal infirmities, produced by suffering and disease, which Pope afterwards introduced with no less acrimony, but with increased wit, in his celebrated character of "Sporus."

Immediately on the production of the offensive pamphlet, Lord Hervey sent to Pulteney, inquiring whether he was correct in presuming him to be his maligner? To this Pulteney replied, that, whether or no he was the author of the "Reply," he was ready to justify and stand by the truth of any part of it, "at what time and wherever Lord Hervey pleased.” "This last message," writes Thomas Pelham to Lord Waldegrave, "your Lordship will easily imagine was the occasion of the duel; and, accordingly, on Monday last, between three and four o'clock in the afternoon, they met in the Upper St. James's Park, behind Arlington Street, with their two seconds, who were Mr. Fox and Sir J. Rushout. The two combatants were each of them slightly wounded, but Mr. Pulteney had once so much the advantage of Lord Hervey, that he would infallibly have run my Lord through the body if his foot had not slipped, and then the seconds took an occasion to part them; upon which Mr. Pulteney embraced Lord Hervey, and expressed a great deal of concern at the accident of their quarrel, promising, at the same time, that he would

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never personally attack him again, either with his mouth or his pen. Lord Hervey made him a bow, without giving him any sort of answer, and, to use the common expression, thus they parted." It is somewhat singular that Lady Hervey, the beautiful and celebrated Mary Lepel, should have afterwards built and resided in a house in the Green Park immediately overlooking the spot where her husband had so narrow an escape from the sword of Lord Bath.

In the time of Henry the Eighth, Hyde Park formed part of a manor belonging to the abbot and monks of Westminster; and, in a survey of church lands, taken in the 26th year of the reign of that monarch, it is styled Manerium de Hyde, and is valued at xiiijl. Although there is some reason to believe that it was formed into a park while still in possession of the monks of Westminster, we have no positive certainty of its having been enclosed till the reign of Edward the Sixth, when we have a record of George Roper having been appointed keeper, with a salary of sixpence a day!

Previous to the reign of Queen Anne, Hyde Park was of much larger extent than it is at the present time. In 1705, that princess curtailed it of thirty acres, which she added to the gardens of Kensington Palace, which a few years previously had been purchased by William the Third of the Earl of Nottingham; and, in 1730, Queen Caroline, the consort of George the Second, appropriated as many as three hundred acres more to the same purpose.

Another and still more deplorable curtailment, for it has divorced, as far as the picturesque is concerned, Hyde Park from the Green Park, and has deprived us of the aspect of a fine uninterrupted space of pleasure-ground,-was the robbery of the angular piece of ground from Hyde Park Corner to beyond Hamilton Place, the boundary-wall of the park anciently running where the houses of Park Lane, formerly called Tyburn Lane, now stand. The ranger's house, it may be remarked, stood on the site of the present Apsley House, and on the site of Hamilton place was the famous fortification thrown up by the citizens of London at the threatened approach of the royal army in 1642.

It would be idle to endeavour to trace any resemblance between the Hyde Park of our own time, and the aspect which it presented as late as the early part of the last century. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, we read of its "herbage, pannage, and browze-wood for deer," and its solitary "lodge and mansion in the Park;" and, at a much later period, we find mention made of a piece of waste ground called "the Moor," the "Tyburn meadow,” and a "parcel of meadow ground enclosed for the deer." It was, indeed, a place of fashionable resort as early as the days of the Commonwealth; but, as we learn from De Grammont, the ground was then a mere uncultivated waste: there were scattered ponds, and "browzing-grounds," and thick woods; and the only resort of the wealthy, the idle, and the gay, was the famous "Ring," around which there

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