In 1791 Walpole writes to Miss Berry to describe the marriage of Lord
Cholmondeley with Lady Georgiana Charlotte Bertie: “The men were in frocks
and white waistcoats. The endowing purse, I believe, has been left off
ever since broad pieces were called in and melted down. We were but
eighteen persons in all.... The poor duchess-mother wept excessively; she
is now left quite alone,--her two daughters married, and her other
children dead. She herself, I fear, is in a very dangerous way. She goes
directly to Spa, where the new married pair are to meet her. We all
separated in an hour and a half.”[731]
Alfred Tennyson in early life had fourth-floor chambers at No. 55, and
there probably his friend Hallam, whose early death he laments in his _In
Memoriam_ spent many an hour with him. There, in the airy regions of
Attica, in a low-roofed room, the single window of which is darkened by a
huge stone balustrade--a gloomy relic of past grandeur--the young poet may
have recited the majestic lines of his “King Arthur,” or the exquisite
lament of “Mariana,” and there he may have immortalised the “plump
head-waiter of the Cock,” in Fleet Street. Mr. John Foster, the author of
many sound and delightful historical biographies, had also chambers in
this house.
No. 68, on the west side, stands on the site of the approach to the
stables of old Newcastle House. Here Judge Le Blanc lived, and at his
death the house was occupied by Mr. Thomas Le Blanc, Master of Trinity
Hall, Cambridge.
At No. 33, on the same side as the Insolvent Debtors’ Court, dwelt Judge
Park, a man much beloved by his friends; in his early days, as a young
and poor Scotch barrister, he had lived in Carey Street till his house
there was burnt down. He used to say that his great ambition in youth had
been to one day live at No. 33 in the Fields, at that time occupied by
Chief Justice Willis; but in later days, as a judge, leaving the former
goal of his ambition, he migrated to Bedford Square, where he died.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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