ments for the comfort of the workpeople, the advertisement and the publishing departments all seem designed with a view to the economy of time, labour and trouble. The buildings have been for the most part reconstructed since 1874, from the designs and under the supervision of Mr. Deacon. They are of great extent, stretching back from Queen Victoria Street, where is the advertisement office, to Playhouse Yard (the publishing office), and including the whole of Printing House Square. They are of red brick with moulded brick dressings (all made from clay dug on Mr. Walter's Bearwood estate), and Cornish granite shafts in the ornamental parts, but generally solidity rather than ornament has been sought after. The Times-"that volume of Modern History put forth day by day," as Sir G. C. Lewis happily designated it in 1849-has taken the lead of all the London papers for very many years, and deservedly so, for the proprietors have spared no money to render it accurate, early, and comprehensive in its intelligence. It was owing to the exertions used by the proprietors of this paper, and the immense outlay which they went to, that the notorious conspiracy of Bogle and his associates was (1841) detected and laid bare. The trial of Bogle v. Lawson (the printer of the paper) will occupy a place in the history of the commerce of this country, whenever such a work shall be again undertaken. A Times Testimonial was subsequently raised by the merchants and bankers of London, a tablet to commemorate the trial and exposure erected in the Royal Exchange, and the bulk of the money raised (the proprietors refusing to take any pecuniary recompense) invested in the funds for certain scholarships-Times Scholarships, as they are called -at Christ's Hospital and the City of London School. Mr. John Walter, under whose superintendence The Times was made what it now is, died in 1847. His father, who started the paper, died in 1812. The centenary number of the Times, January 1, 1888, contains a full history of the paper in its early days. William Faithorne, the engraver, went to live in this square about 1680, chiefly employing himself in drawing from the life in crayons; here he died in 1691, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Anne's, Blackfriars. Privy Council Office, DOWNING STREET, WHITEHALL, is part of the south end of the range of buildings known as the Treasury. Here are kept the minutes of the Privy Councils of the Crown, commencing in 1540. Privy Garden, behind WHITEHALL, now called WHITEHALL GARDENS, a square of ground containing 31 acres,' between Parliament Street and the Thames, and appertaining to the King's Palace at Whitehall. May 21, 1662.—In the Privy Garden saw the finest smocks and linen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine's, laced with rich lace at the bottom, that ever I saw ; and did me good to look at them.-Pepys. 1 Hatton, p. 66, who describes it as "lying between the Cockpit and the Thames.' The Privy Garden, when Mr. Pepys was in it, was laid out into sixteen square compartments of grass, each compartment having a standing statue in the centre. The garden was concealed from the street by a lofty wall; from the river by the Stone Gallery and state apartments; from the court behind the Banqueting House by the lodgings of the chief attendants on the King; and from the Bowlinggreen, to which it led, by a row of lofty trees. It would appear to have been in every respect a private garden. In the original Privy Garden Charles I., when Prince of Wales, caused a dial to be set up, and by command of James I. there was written, "The Description and use of his Majesty's Dial in Whitehall Garden, by Edmund Gunter, London, 1624," 4to. It was defaced and went to ruin in King Charles II.'s time. This place for a dial was too insecure, Since a guard and a garden could not it defend; Other dials of glass, arranged pyramidically, were placed here by Francis Hall, alias Line, a Jesuit, in 1669. Vertue and Walpole speak of their remains.1 "An explication of the diall sett up in the King's garden at London, anno 1669; in which very many sorts of dyalls are conteined, etc.," was printed at Liége, by Guillaume Henry Steel, in 1673, 4to. James II. relates in his Memoirs that on one occasion when Charles II. was rising from the Council he saw the Secretary of State lay several commissions before him, which he at once signed and passed on to the Privy Garden. ... The Duke stay'd behind and took up one of the Commissions which prov'd to be that for the Duke of Monmouth's Generalship, and looking in it to see how it was drawn, he found the word Natural had been scrap'd out in all the places where it had been writt, and the word Son only left in. The Duke took the Commission and carryd it immediately to the King then walking in the Garden, and withall desired his Maty that the word Natural might again be put into the Commission as it had been, and as it ought to be. Whereupon the King taking out his sizers cutt the Commission in two, and order'd an other to be prepar'd for him to sign with the word Natural in it.-Clarke's James II., vol. i. p. 497. Evelyn records, May 31, 1672, that a day or two before he here took leave of "that incomparable person," the Earl of Sandwich, setting out to fight the Dutch, and full of foreboding of the death that was so close at hand. The wall that enclosed the Privy Garden was a favourite station for the display of the old ballad-sellers' wares. "I have seen Mr. Burke," said Joseph Moser, "examining the ballads, etc., upon the wall of Privy Garden, with an attention which our greatest authors might have thought it an honour to excite." 2 The present Privy Garden, or Whitehall Gardens, consists of a row of large houses fronting the river, from which it is divided by the Victoria Embankment, and is part in the parish of St. Martin's-in-the2 Europ. Mag., 1796. 1 Anecd. of Painting, vol. ii. p. 54. Fields and part in the parish of St. Margaret's, Westminster. The centre house was the residence of Sir Robert Peel, the eminent statesman, who formed here the fine collection of Dutch and Flemish pictures, now a part of the National collection. He died in the diningroom on the ground-floor facing the river, July 2, 1850. In an action in the Court of Exchequer, February 1870, brought by the third Sir Robert Peel to recover £5355 from the Metropolitan Board of Works for damage and deterioration caused by the construction of the Thames Embankment, Sir Robert stated that the "house was built in 1824, that there were steps leading to the river, and he remembered that on one occasion, when a boy, preparations were made to remove the family and valuables by boats on occasion of a threatened attack by a riotous mob on his father's house." A house, which formed a part of the old palace, granted by William III. to the Earl of Portland, was long the town residence of the Dukes of Portland. Here lived the Duchess of Portland who purchased the Barberini Vase, and from it the house received its present name. Here the Duchess had collected an extraordinary museum, to the great disgust of her family. All the purchases were not like that of the Vase, which was kept secret from them till her death in the following year. Her museum was sold in this house, the auction beginning April 4 and ending June 7, 1786. The Duke of Portland bought the Vase for £1029, the cameo of Jupiter Serapis for £173:5s., and that of Augustus Cæsar for £236: 5s. The Vase was No. 4155-the last lot. At the south end of Privy Gardens is the fine modern mansion of the Duke of Buccleuch. [See Montague House, Whitehall.] The minister Earl of Liverpool resided in the Privy Gardens, and here at various times have lived the Earl of Fife, the Earl of Malmesbury, the Earl of Loudon, the Earl of Harrington, Lord Gage, and many other persons of distinction. Privy Seal Office, I NEW STREET, SPRING GARDENS, an office belonging to the Crown. The chief officer is called the Lord Privy Seal, and is always a cabinet minister. The Privy Seal is affixed to such grants as are required to pass the Great Seal. A grant must first pass the Privy Signet, then the Privy Seal, and lastly the Great Seal of England. The Great Seal is kept by the Lord Chancellor. Privy Stairs, WHITEHALL, the stairs leading from the Privy Garden, by which the sovereigns and courtiers, when the King was resident at Whitehall, passed to and from the barges on the Thames. In February 1613, on the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with the Palatine, Francis Beaumont wrote a masque for the allied houses of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple. The subject, the nuptials of the Thames and the Rhine, appears to have been suggested by Bacon, who took the greatest interest in its progress and success. The procession was by water from Winchester Place in Southwark to Whitehall, but the King was sleepy and weary when it arrived, and it never got beyond Privy Stairs. Bacon remonstrated with the King, beseeching him. "not to bury them quick," to which James replied that the alternative would be equivalent to "burying him quick, for he could last no longer." So, Chamberlain adds, "they came home as they went, without doing anything." Prujean Square, OLD BAILEY, on the west side, a few doors from Ludgate Hill, so named from the residence here of Sir Francis Prujean, an eminent physician, who was President of the College of Physicians 1650-1654. In the latter year, when Harvey declined the office on account of age and infirmity, Prujean was on his advice chosen for the fifth time. In Strype's Map it is called Prideaux Court, Dodsley calls it Prujean Court. Gunner, a fashionable hairdresser and perfumer, lived here, and in 1783 advertised that "ladies' maids, valets, and servants in general," are "taught to cut and dress hair in perfection in one month, at one guinea and a half each, at Gunner's Original Academy, No. 6 Prujean Square." Further, "Mr. Gunner is always at home to dress ladies at one shilling . . . best scented powder and pomatum included." ✓ Pudding Lane, EASTCHEAP to Lower Thames Street. Then have ye one other lane called Rother Lane or Red Rose Lane, of such a sign there, now commonly called Pudding Lane, because the butchers of Eastcheap have their scalding houses for hogs there, and their puddings with other filth of beasts are voided down that way to their dung boats on the Thames. This lane stretcheth from Thames Street to Little East Cheap, chiefly inhabited by basket makers, turners and butchers, and is all of Billingsgate Ward.-Stow, p. 79. Phil. Come, Sergeants, I'll step to my uncle's, not far off, hereby in Pudding Lane, and he shall bail me.-Westward Ho, Act i. Sc. 2. Venus. Right, forsooth, I am Cupid's mother, Cupid's own mother, forsooth; yes, forsooth. I dwell in Pudding Lane. Christmas. Good Lady Venus of Pudding Lane; you must go out for all this.Ben Jonson, Masque of Christmas, 1616. The Fire of London, commonly called the Great Fire, commenced on the east side of this lane between one and two in the morning of Sunday, September 2, 1666, in the house of Farryner, the King's baker. It was the fashion of the True Blue Protestants of the period to attribute the fire to the Roman Catholics, and when, in 1681, Oates and his plot strengthened this belief, the following inscription was affixed on the front of the house (No. 25), erected on the site of Farryner the baker's : Here, by ye Permission of Heaven, Hell brake loose upon this Protestant City, from the malicious hearts of barbarous Papists by ye hand of their Agent Hubert, who confessed, and on the ruines of this place declared the fact for which he was hanged, viz., That here begun thet dreadful Fire which is described and perpetuated on and by the neighbouring Pillar.-Erected Anno 1681, in the Mayoralty of Sir Patience Ward, Kt. This celebrated inscription, set up pursuant to an order of the Court of Common Council, June 17, 1681, was removed in the reign of James II., replaced in the reign of William III., and finally taken down, on account of the stoppage of passengers to read it." Entick, who made additions to Maitland in 1756, speaks of it as "lately taken away." The house was "rebuilt in a very handsome manner." 1 The inscribed stone was buried in the cellar of the house in Pudding Lane, where it was found when the house was pulled down in 1876 and presented to the City Museum, where it is carefully preserved. Hubert was a French Papist, of six-and-twenty years of age, the son of a watchmaker at Rouen in Normandy. He was seized in Essex, confessed he had begun the fire, and persisting in his confession, was hanged, upon no other evidence than his own. He stated in his examination that he had been "suborned at Paris to this action," and that there were "three more combined to do the same thing." They asked him if he knew the place where he had first put fire. He answered he "knew it very well, and would show it to anybody." He was then ordered to be blindfolded, and carried to several places of the City, that he might point out the house. They first led him to a place at some distance from it, opened his eyes, and asked him if that was it, to which he answered "No; it was lower, nearer to the Thames." "The house and all which were near it," says Clarendon, "were so covered and buried in ruins, that the owners themselves, without some infallible mark, could very hardly have said where their own houses had stood; but this man led them directly to the place, described how it stood, the shape of the little yard, the fashion of the door and windows, and where he first put the fire; and all this with such exactness, that they who had dwelt long near it could not so perfectly have described all particulars." Tillotson told Burnet that Howell (the then Recorder of London) accompanied Hubert on this occasion," was with him, and had much discourse with him; and that he concluded it was impossible it could be a melancholy dream." This, however, was not the opinion of the judges who tried him. "Neither the judges," says Clarendon, "nor any present at the trial, did believe him. guilty, but that he was a poor distracted wretch, weary of his life, and chose to part with it this way." We may attribute the fire with safety to another cause than a Roman Catholic conspiracy. We are to remember that the flames originated in the house of a baker; that the season had been unusually dry; that the houses were of wood, overhanging the roadway, so that the lane was even narrower than it is now, and that a strong east wind was blowing at the time. It was thought very little of at first. Pepys put out his head from his bedroom window in Seething Lane a few hours after it broke out, and returned to bed again, as if it were nothing more than an ordinary fire, a common occurrence, and likely to be soon subdued. The Lord Mayor (Sir Thomas Bludworth) seems to have thought as little of it till it was too late. People appear to have been paralysed, and no attempt of any consequence was made to check its progress. For four successive days it raged and gained ground, leaping after a prodigious manner from house to house and street to street, at great distances from one another. 1 Dodsley's London, 8vo, 1761, vol. v. p. 232. |