shall say how we love our "prison flower?" The literary associations of Bloomsbury are yet another feature of its charm. Though Russell Square and its surroundings generally are being gradually rebuilt and improved, yet in some places you can still see the actual old houses standing that, in the century's early years, were the homes of celebrated men. Thus, No. 65 in Russell Square was the abode of Sir Thomas Lawrence, the painter, and here he received the distinguished sitters, the eminent men and fair ladies who have made his name famous. Here, for instance, at this common-place house door, while the Russian general Platoff was having his portrait painted inside, were posted his attendant Cossacks, "mounted" says an eye-witness, "on their small white horses, with their long spears grounded," standing as sentinels at the door of the great painter. Lawrence died here in 1830, and the house is not in essentials altered since his day. At No. 5 in the square lived, from 1856 to 1862, Frederick Denison Maurice, the "Christian Socialist," and here he held his famous "prophetic breakfasts." At No. 56 Mary Russell Mitford stayed in 1836. The house near by--No. 66--is a curious survival of the days when Bloomsbury was a centre of fashion. Its enormous size, its palatial reception rooms, its tall corridors, now deserted and solitary except for a few colossal statues in niches, all suggest the glare of light, the sound of music, the rustle of fine dresses that filled it in old days. Hawthorne and Dickens suggested that old houses felt and suffered; the same idea intrudes itself upon us here. The rusted iron arches that used in the old days to support lamps,--now darkened,--still hang here and there in Bloomsbury streets; and, in some cases the actual iron torch-extinguishers that were used when sedan chairs were in fashion, remain to tell their story of ancient grandeur. Nothing is in its way more plaintive than an old and desolate house of this kind; its glory departed, its decorations falling to decay, its "garden" a wilderness of walls, roofs, and broken bottles, its rooms, even, perchance, in course of being broken up into solicitors' or other offices. Bloomsbury Square, indeed--the square nearest to Holborn--has, in this way, entirely merged into offices, the residents being practically ousted. But Russell Square, despite the new Russell Hotel that rises palatially along its north-eastern block, and despite the large Pitman's School of Shorthand at its south-eastern corner, is still almost entirely residential. None of its modern innovations can altogether abolish or destroy the spirit and feeling of Thackeray that it breathes. Here lived old Osborne, the purse-proud banker; there is going on old Sedley's sale; I can see the packing-cases, the "loafers" and the vans at this moment; and here, by these very prosaic green square railings, is Amelia, sad and black garbed, looking with tear-filled eyes for her boy George.