wonderful panelled staircase, a perfect specimen of its kind, that formerly graced the hall of No. 35.
Lindsay House, now Nos. 59 and 60, one of the Inigo Jones houses, was built for the Earl of Lindsay, who died fighting for Charles I. at Edgehill. Peter Cunningham says that it was called Ancaster House when the fourth earl was created Duke of Ancaster, and that he sold it to the proud Duke of Somerset—I do not know why Mr. Cunningham insists on his pride in italics—who married the widow of the Mr. Thomas Thynne whose murder by Count Koenigsmarck is so dramatically portrayed on his tomb in Westminster Abbey.
No. 66, at the corner of Great Queen Street, was once occupied by the Duke of Newcastle, George II.’s prime minister.
We have travelled far searching for freedom in the last 250 years and one would like to know how the Wellsian attitude is regarded by the ghost of the creator of this old house—the Marquis of Powis, who built it in 1686, before he was outlawed by William and Mary because of his loyalty to James II. He probably chose the site because it was near the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador—the oldest Roman Catholic chapel in London—where the Roman Catholics used to go when they were deprived of their churches, and where Fanny Burney was married in 1793. It was removed, unluckily, in 1910.
There have been poets, too, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, before the men of law took possession. Milton and Thomas Campbell lived at No. 61 and Lord Tennyson at No. 58, where, you remember, Mr. Tulkinghorne of Bleak House had his rooms.
It is a house also haunted with memories of Nell Gwynne, for she had lodgings here and gave birth to the first Duke of St. Albans, while she was still acting in the nearby theatre in Portugal Row!
This Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre stood just at the back of the Royal College of Surgeons, on the south side of the square. Three theatres called the Duke’s Theatre were successively built on the same spot. The first one was a pioneer in its way, for it was here that regular stage scenery was introduced in England and that women’s parts were first played by women. The ubiquitous Pepys was a regular frequenter of the theatre, and duly recorded his meeting with Nell Gwynne and that here he saw Hamlet played for the first time.
Though it is seventy-three years since the last theatre was taken down to enlarge the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, and there is nothing to be seen of it to-day, I like to keep its memory green because it was here, on the night of January 29th, 1728, nearly two hundred years ago, that Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly Peachum, sang herself into the heart of the Duke of Bolton, when John Rich produced Mr. Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. It ran for sixty-two nights in one season and made “Gay rich and Rich gay.”