Close to the spot which must have been the site of Milton's residence is Queen's Square, where the celebrated Jeremy Bentham lived and died; and a little to the east is Storey's Gate, formerly called Storehouse Gate, from a storehouse of the ordnance having formerly stood here. Almost immediately facing Buckingham Palace, and adjoining Storey's Gate, the houses on the western side of Duke Street, Westminster, look into the park. The chapel a conspicuous object as we pass from the Bird-cage Walk — was originally a wing of the mansion of the infamous Judge Jeffries, and it was by the particular favour of his sovereign, James the Second, that he was allowed to construct the flight of steps which still lead into the park. The house in Duke Street was afterward purchased by the government from the son of Lord Jeffries, and was used as the Admiralty office, till the erection of the present unsightly building in Whitehall.

Let us pass from the park through Storey's Gate into Westminster.

Dorset, Cromwell

CHURCH.

Westminster, King Street - Residence of Spenser, Carew, Lord - Great Plague - Mrs. Oldfield - Downing Street Gardiner's Lane - Cannon RowSt. Margaret's Church -The Sanctuary.

Iwith its venera

ble abbey, its remains of the ancient palace of the Saxon kings, and its gloomy and narrow streets, once the residence of peers, courtiers, and poets -constitutes, perhaps, the most interesting district of the great metropolis. We have the sanctuary, too, famous in history, the beautiful but mouldering cloisters of the old abbey, the Almonry, anciently called the Eleemosynary, where the monks distributed alms to the poor, and where Caxton, under the auspices of Bishop Islip, established the first printing-press in England; and, lastly, we have still left to us Westminster Hall, with all its host of historical associations.

Fashion, or rather an entire change in the rank and character of its inhabitants, has revolutionised

the aspect of the streets of Westminster far more than time. It was only yesterday that the author made a pilgrimage through its confined streets and dingy alleys, and, with one single exception, he found every street which he was in search of bearing the same name by which it was distinguished two centuries ago. Milton, Spenser, Herrick, Ben Jonson, Davenant, Dorset, with how many of the greatest or the sweetest of our national poets are those streets associated! To the author, the most pleasing part of his labours in composing the present work has been to search out the haunts

- and they generally comprise the calamities— of departed genius,

"Free from the crowd, each hallowed spot I roam,

Where genius found a death-bed or a home;
While memory lingers on each honoured name,
Through life despised, yet heirs to endless fame;

Children of fancy, famine, and despair,

Whose drink was tears, whose daily bread was care;
Ambition's playthings, o'er whose sacred dust
Relenting Time has reared the tardy bust.
Here Dryden's genius soared its lofty flight,
There fancy blazed through Milton's darkened sight;
These walls still speak of Goldsmith's mournful tale;
Here Spenser starved; there Rushworth died in jail;
Here Otway's fate yon frowning Tower recalls;
Here Gay was nursed in Queensberry's ducal halls;
Those walls, where Prior was beloved of yore,
Received with rapture one true poet more.
Here, in this chamber, Congreve's hours were blest,
With blooming Wortley for his evening guest;

Here Oldfield's beaming eyes and quiet mirth
Threw love and laughter o'er the poet's hearth;
Here flashed his wit, and here the poet died,
Marlborough's young duchess weeping by his side;
Reversed for him the bard's proverbial doom,
Through life beloved, and wept o'er in the tomb."
-J. H. J.

Previous to the building of the present Parliament Street, late in the last century, King Street constituted the only thoroughfare between the cities. of London and Westminster; and such was its miserable state that, to a late period, on the days on which the sovereign opened or dissolved Parliament, fagots were thrown into the ruts to render the passage of the ponderous state-coach more easy. When we consider this circumstance, it is not a little curious, in glancing over the "New View of London," published in 1708, to find King Street dignified as "the most spacious street and principal for trade in Westminster, being between the gate at the south end of the Privy Garden and the Abbey Yard." It may be mentioned that the gate here alluded to was not the one designed by Holbein, which we shall describe in our notices of Whitehall, but a smaller one which spanned King Street immediately to the north of where Downing Street now stands. The latter originally formed a part of the palace of Whitehall, and in. the reign of Charles the First contained the apartments of the beautiful and intriguing Mary, Count

ess of Buckingham, the mother of the great favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. She died in the "Gatehouse Whitehall," in 1632, and from hence her body was conveyed with great pomp to Westminster Abbey, where it lies beside the murdered remains of her ill-fated son.

King Street is replete with interesting associations. Either in this gloomy thoroughfare, or in the streets which diverge from it, have lived or died many illustrious persons whose names are familiar to us in the literary or historical annals of our country; moreover, through this mean thoroughfare the majority of our kings, since the Conquest, have passed to their coronations at Westminster, and not a few of them subsequently to their tombs in the abbey.

The first illustrious name with which King Street is associated is that of Edmund Spenser. When Tyrone's rebellion burst forth in Ireland in 1598, the political opinions of the great poet rendered him so obnoxious to the infuriated insurgents that his only hope for safety was in an immediate flight. He had scarcely turned his back on his beloved home at Kilcolman, when the rebels took possession of it; his goods were carried off; the house was set on fire, and an infant child, whom he had been compelled to leave behind in the confusion of his flight, perished in the flames. Ruined and broken-hearted, the great poet flew to England, and, on his arrival in the vast metropolis,.