* The name 'Leicester Square'--it is but right to say--is also of fairly early date. In 'A Journey through England,' 4th cd., 1724, 1778, the writer, speaking of the space before Leicester House, says: 'This was till these Fourteen Years always called Leicester-Fields, but now Leicester- Square.'' There is, however, abundant evidence that the older name continued to be freely used throughout the century. For example, in 1783, Mrs. Hogarth's house is advertised as 'The Golden Head, in Leicester Fields;' and it is "at his house in Leicester Fields,' in 1792, that Malone makes Reynolds die. It is in Ralph Agas his survey of 592 (or rather in Mr. W. H. Overall's excellent facsimile) that we make our first acquaintance with the Fields, then really entitled to their name. According to Agas, the ground to the north-west of Charing Cross, and immediately to the east of the present Whitcomb Street (at that time Hedge Lane) was formerly open pasture land, occupied--in the plan--by a pair of pedestrians larger than life, a woman laying out clothes, and two nondescript quadrupeds, of which one is broken-backed beyond the licence of deformity. The only erections to be discovered are the King's Mews, clustering together for company at the back of the Cross. Sixty years later, judging from the map known generally as Faithorne's, the locality had become more populated.. To the right of St. Martin's Lane it is thickly crowded with buildings; to the left also a line of houses is springing up and creeping northward; while in the open space above referred to stand a couple of lordly mansions. One, on a site which must have lain to the north of the present Little Newport Street, is Newport House, the town residence of Mountjoy Blount, Earl of Newport; the other, which occupies ground now traversed by Leicester Place, is Leicester House. Its garden at the back extended across the eastern end of Lisle Street, and its boundary wall to the north was also the southern boundary wall of the old Military Garden where King James's son, Prince Henry of Wales--whose gallant and martial presentment you shall see figured in the forefront of Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion--had been wont to exercise his troops, and make the now-discredited welkin ring with the shooting-off of chambers, with alarums, and points of war. Leicester House the first was built about 1632-6 by Robert Sydney, 2nd Earl of Leicester, the father of Algernon Sydney and of that beautiful Dorothy, afterwards Countess of Sunderland, whom Van Dyck painted and Waller 'Petrarchized' as Sacharissa. The site (Swan Close) * was what is known as Lammas-land, and from the Overseers' books of the Parish of St. Martin's in the Fields, the Earl seems not only to have paid 'Lamas' for 'the ground that adjoins to the Military Wall,' but also 'for the field that is before his house'--i.e. Leicester Fields.