On the death of Sackville the poet, Cecil took the white staff, being already Premier-Secretary. His ambition stretched into every department of the State. “He built a new palace at Hatfield, and a new Exchange in the Strand. Countesses intrigued for him. His son married a Howard, his daughter a Clifford. Ambassadors started for Italy, less to see Doges and Grand Dukes than to pick up pictures and statues, and bronzes and hangings, for his vast establishment at Hatfield Chase. His gardeners travelled through France to buy up mulberries and vines. Salisbury House, on the Thames, almost rivalled the luxurious villas of the Roman cardinals; yet, under this blaze of worldly success, Cecil was the most miserable of men. Friends grudged his rise; his health was broken; the reins which his ambition drew into his hands were beyond the powers of a single man to grasp; and the vigour of his frame, wasted by years of voluptuous licence, failed him at the moment when the strain on his faculties was at the full.”[160] In Little Salisbury House lived William Cavendish, third Earl of Devonshire, and father of the first Duke of Devonshire, one of the leaders of the great revolution that drove out the Stuarts. Two or three days after the Restoration, King Charles, passing in his coach through the Strand, espied Hobbes, that mischievous writer in favour of absolute power, standing at the door of his patron the earl. The king took off his hat very kindly to the old man, gave him his hand to kiss, asked after his health, ordered Cooper to take his portrait, and settled on him a pension of £100 a year. Hobbes had been an assistant of Bacon, and a friend of Ben Jonson and of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. He had taught Charles II. mathematics, and corresponded with Descartes. In the street standing on the site of Sir Robert Cecil’s house was the residence of the famous Partridge, the cobbler, impudent sham-almanac maker, and predecessor of our own Moore and Zadkiel, who had foretold the death of the French king. To expose this noisy charlatan and upset his ridiculous hap-hazard predictions, Swift with cruel and trenchant malice reported and lamented his decease in the _Tatler_ (1708), to which he contributed under the name of Bickerstaff. The article raised a laugh that has not even quite died away in the present day. Partridge, furious at his losses and the extinguishing of his ill-earned fame, knocked down a hawker who passed his stall crying an account of his death. This happening just as the joke was fading, revived it again, and finally ruined the almanac of poor Partridge.[161] “The villain,” says the poor outwitted astrologer, “told the world I was dead, and how I died, and that he was with me at the time of my death. I thank God, by whose mercy I have my being, that I am still alive, and, excepting my age, as well as ever I was in my life.” He actually died in 1715.