But the literary memories of Bloomsbury are like the sands of the sea for multitude. They may be found even in the dingy streets running east of Tavistock Square, leading north towards the tram-lines and general squalor of King's Cross. At No. 26 Marchmont Street, the youthful Shelley and the still more youthful Mary Godwin, afterwards Shelley's second wife, lived in 1815, before Harriet's death and their own legal marriage; and here their first baby was born and died. "Shelley and Clara go out about a cradle," Mary's diary records, a few days after the infant's birth. Here Mary read _Corinne_ and _Rinaldini_, and mourned over her little dead child, "a span-long dead baby, and in the lodgings in Marchmont Street an empty cradle." Possibly Marchmont Street then was not quite so slummy as it is now; but this young couple, treading "the bright Castalian brink and Latmos' steep," were probably just as unconscious of London mud as of any disorder, actual or moral, in their establishment. At 54, Hunter Street, a street just east of Marchmont Street, and now exhibiting, in all its phases, the gradual decay described by Dickens, John Ruskin was born in 1819; and here, as he describes in _Præterita_, he used, at the age of four, to enjoy from his nursery window "the view of a marvellous iron post, out of which the water-carts were filled through beautiful little trap-doors, by pipes like boa constrictors," a mystery which, he says, he was never weary of contemplating. If any such little observant boy should happen to live there now, he would have something further to contemplate, to wit, the frequent green omnibuses, for this is now the much-travelled omnibus route between the stations of King's Cross and Victoria. Hunter Street runs into Brunswick Square, where, at No. 32, the _Punch_ artist John Leech lived for ten years, and suffered many afflictions at the hands of persistent organ-grinders, who, if they did not really shorten his life, at any rate aggravated the illness of which he died. London is conservative in its habits, and organ-grinders, trooping in from their neighbouring home of Hatton Garden--even occasionally a low type of nigger minstrels--still haunt this spot, as they do all places, for that matter, where boarding-houses congregate. The regular attendance of what is termed a "piano-organ" always denotes a boarding-house; the louder its screech the better, for the boarder seems fond of noise. His mode of life is peculiar and unique. He will sit on the balcony smoking, or eat his dinner with his friends almost in public; it is all the same to him. Such sign-manuals betray the "select boarding establishment" almost as much as does the row of five ornate cracked glazed pots, yellow and blue alternately, that adorn its lower windows; or to quote Dickens: "the meat-safe looking blinds in the parlour windows, blue and gold curtains in the drawing-room, and spring roller blinds all the way