As a man who deals with the merits of a book is little or nothing concerned with the binding thereof, with the water-marks, or with the printing, but is altogether concerned with the life that is within, that is, with the author, his thoughts, and his expression of them, so, in treating of Northumberland House, we care much less for notices of the building than of its inhabitants--less for the outward aspect than for what has been said or done beneath its roof. If we look with interest at a mere wall which screens from sight the stage of some glorious or some terrible act, it is not for the sake of the wall or its builders: our interest is in the drama and its actors. Who cares, in speaking of Shakespeare and Hamlet, to know the name of the stage carpenter at the Globe or the Blackfriars? Suffice it to say, that Lord Howard, who was an amateur architect of some merit, is supposed to have had a hand in designing the old house in the Strand, and that Gerard Christmas and Bernard Jansen are said to have been his ‘builders.’ Between that brick house and the present there is as much sameness as in the legendary knife which, after having had a new handle, subsequently received in addition a new blade. The old house occupied three sides of a square. The fourth side, towards the river, was completed in the middle of the seventeenth century. The portal retains something of the old work, but so little as to be scarcely recognisable, except to professional eyes. From the date of its erection till 1614 it bore the name of Northampton House. In that year it passed by will from Henry Howard, Lord Northampton, to his nephew, Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, from whom it was called Suffolk House. In 1642, Elizabeth, daughter of Theophilus, second Earl of Suffolk, married Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, and the new master gave his name to the old mansion. The above-named Lord Northampton was the man who has been described as foolish when young, infamous when old, an encourager, at threescore years and ten, of his niece, the infamous Countess of Essex; and who, had he lived a few months longer, would probably have been hanged for his share, with that niece and others, in the mysterious murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Thus, the founder of the house was noble only in name; his successor and nephew has not left a much more brilliant reputation. He was connected, with his wife, in frauds upon the King, and was fined heavily. The heiress of Northumberland, who married his son, came of a noble but ill-fated race, especially after the thirteenth Baron Percy was created Earl of Northumberland in 1377. Indeed, the latter title had been borne by eleven persons before it was given to a Percy, and by far the greater proportion of the whole of them came to grief. Of one of them it is stated that he (Alberic) was appointed Earl in 1080, but that, _proving unfit for the dignity_, he was displaced, and