purchased part of the estate out and out, and a few years afterwards acquired the remainder. To the last day of his life he retained the keenest interest in the place, and only a few hours before his death caused himself to be carried into the gardens to take a parting look at them. At his country-seat of Denbies near Dorking in Surrey, he had another private garden, in the embellishment of which he must have found an outlet for some otherwise obstructed eccentricity, since it contained a representation of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where, in an alcove, had been depicted, in two compartments, the ends of the infidel and the Christian. According to the 'Gentleman's Magazine,' Tyers passed through the Valley himself in July, 1767. His descendants long continued to manage Vauxhall Gardens. Perhaps the most notable of these was his eldest son Tom, the friend and biographer of Johnson, and the 'Tom Restless' of the 'Idler.' XXI. AT LEICESTER FIELDS. |IT is with places as with persons: they often attract us more in their youth than in their maturer years Apart from the fact that these papers are confessedly confined to the Eighteenth Century, this threadbare truth affords a sufficient excuse for speaking of Leicester Square by its earlier, rather than by its existing name. And, indeed, the abiding interest of the locality lies more in the past than in the present. Not even the addition to the inclosure of busts and a Shakespeare fountain, has been able to regenerate entirely the Leicester Square that most of us remember, with its gloomy back streets,--its fringe of dingy _cafés_ and _restaurants_,--its ambiguous print and curiosity shops,--its incorrigibly unacclimatized Alhambra, whose garish Saracenic splendours scale and peel perpetually in London's _imber edax_. If we call anything forcibly to mind in connection with the spot, it is a certain central statue, long the mock of the irreverent,--a statue of the first George, which had come of old, gilded and magnificent, from 'Timon's Villa' at Canons, to fall at last upon evil days and evil tongues, to be rudely spotted with sacrilegious paint, to be crowned with a fool's cap, and, finally, to present itself to the spectator in the generally dishonoured and dilapidated condition in which, some twenty years ago, it was exhibited by the late John O'Connor on the walls of the Royal Academy. But when, travelling rapidly backwards, past the Empire and the Alhambra, past Wylde's Globe and the Panopticon, past Burford's Panorama and Miss Linwood's needlework, we enter the last century, we are in the Leicester Fields of Reynolds and Hogarth, of Newton and John Hunter,--the Leicester Fields of Sir George Savile and Frederick, Prince of Wales, of Colbert and Prince Eugene. This is the Leicester Fields of which we propose to speak. Leicester Square and its notorieties may be left to the topographers of the future. *