Somerset House occupies the site of the older palace, a site almost equal in area to Russell Square. But the older palace, as befitted the "Dower House" of the Queens of England had gardens that extended along the river-shore. It was in Old Somerset House that Charles II.'s poor neglected Queen, Catherine of Braganza, used to sit all night playing at "ombre," a game which she had herself imported from Portugal; and it was here, in 1685, that three of her household were charged with decoying Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey into the precincts of the palace, and there strangling him. The wide courtyard of the interior has a bronze allegorical group by _Bacon_, of George III. mixed up with "Father Thames." Queen Charlotte, apparently rather resenting the ugliness of the representation, said to the sculptor, "Why did you make so frightful a figure?" The artist was ready with his reply. "Art," he said, bowing, "cannot always effect what is ever within the reach of Nature--the union of beauty and majesty." I myself must confess to some sympathy with Queen Charlotte; but the art of her day had ever a tendency to efflorescent excrescence. On the river's very brink, a little higher up than Somerset House and its adjacent hotels, Cleopatra's Needle, that "great rose-marble monolith," stands guarded by two bronze sphinxes on a pediment of steps, backed by the Embankment and the trees of its gardens. The monolith is here in strange and novel surroundings. What ruins of empires and dynasties has not this ancient Egyptian obelisk seen! We poor human beings soon live out our little day, and are gone: "The Eternal Saki from the Bowl hath poured Millions of bubbles like us, and will pour----"