No. 15, York Place, was, between the years 1813 and 1821, the retirement of Francis Hargrave, a laborious literary barrister, and the editor of ‘A Collection of State Trials,’ {84} and many other esteemed legal works. Here he died on the 16th of August, 1821, at the age of eighty-one. In 1813, when obliged to abandon his arduous profession, in consequence of over-mental excitement, the sum of £8,000 was voted by Parliament, upon the motion of Mr. Whitbread, for the purchase of Mr. Hargrave’s law books, which were enriched with valuable notes, and for 300 MSS., to be deposited in the library of Lincoln’s Inn, for public use. As documents of national historical importance may be particularised, Mr. Hargrave’s first publication, in 1772, entitled ‘_The Case of James Somerset_, _a Negro_, _lately determined by the Court of King’s Bench_, _wherein it is attempted to demonstrate the present unlawfulness of Domestic Slavery in England_;’ his ‘_Three Arguments in the two causes in Chancery on the last Will of Peter Thellusson_, _Esq._, _with Mr. Morgan’s __Calculation of the Accumulation under the Trusts of the Will_, _1799_;’ and his ‘_Opinion in the Case of the Duke of Athol in respect to the Isle of Man_.’ Opposite to York Place was a fine, open, airy piece of ground to which Mr. Curtis, the eminent naturalist, removed his botanical garden from Lambeth Marsh, as a more desirable locality. Upon the south-east portion of this nursery-ground the first stone was laid by H.R.H. Prince Albert, on the 11th July, 1844, of an hospital for consumption and diseases of the chest, and which was speedily surrounded by houses on all sides; probably a circumstance not contemplated at the time the ground was secured. The botanical garden of Mr. Curtis, as a public resort for study, was continued at Brompton until 1808, when the lease of the land being nearly expired, Mr. Salisbury, who in 1792 became his pupil, and in 1798 his partner in this horticultural speculation, removed the establishment to the vacant space of ground now inclosed between Sloane Street and Cadogan Place, where Mr. Salisbury’s undertaking failed. A plan of the gardens there, as arranged by him, was published in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ for August, 1810. {85}