One Sunday morning my mother allowed me, before we entered the little church[71] in High Street, Marylebone, to stand to see the young gentlemen of Mr. Fountayne’s boarding-school cross the road, while the bell was chiming for sacred duties. I remember well a summer’s sun shone with full refulgence at the time, and my youthful eyes were dazzled with the various colours of the dresses of the youths, who walked two and two, some in pea-green, others sky-blue, and several in the brightest scarlet; many of them wore gold-laced hats, while the flowing locks of others, at that time allowed to remain uncut at schools, fell over their shoulders. To the best of my recollection, the scholars amounted to about one hundred. As the pleasurable and often idle scenes of my schoolboy days are pictured upon my retina whenever Crouch End, or the name of my venerable master, Norton,[72] are mentioned, and as others may feel similar delight with respect to the places at which they received their early education, I shall endeavour to gratify a few of my readers by a description of the house and playground of Mr. Fountayne’s academy. For this purpose it may not be irrelevant to notice something of the antiquity of that once splendid mansion, in which so many persons have passed their early and innocent hours. Topographers who mention Marylebone Park inform us that foreign ambassadors were in the time of Queen Elizabeth and James I. amused there by hunting, and that the oldest parts of this school were the remains of the palace in which they were entertained. The earliest topographical representation which I am enabled to instance, is a drawing made by Joslin, dated 1700, formerly in the possession of his Grace the Duke of Buckingham, of which I published an etching. It comprehends the field-gate and palace, its surrounding walls and adjacent buildings in Marylebone to the south-west, including a large mansion, which in all probability had been Oxford House, the grand receptacle of the Harleian Library. Fortune, I am sorry to say, has not favoured me with the power of continuing the declining history of the palace to the period at which it became an academy, nor can I discover the time in which Monsieur de la Place first occupied it.[73] A daughter of De la Place married the Rev. Mr. Fountayne,[74] whose name the school retained until its final demolition in 1791, at which period I remember seeing the large stone balls taken from the brick piers of the gates.