Evelyn has mentioned the Mulberry Gardens. This place was on the site of Buckingham Palace. James the First in 1609, following the example of Henry the Fourth of France, endeavoured to establish a silk-growing industry. With this object he sent out to the various counties mulberry-trees by the hundred thousand. He enclosed four acres of St. James’s Park, and planted them with mulberry-trees. In Cromwell’s time the Gardens were sold; at the Restoration they returned to the King, who threw them open. They became for a time the fashionable resort; by day the non-decorous took cheese-cakes in their summer houses; at night they were the haunt of “gentlemen and ladies that made love together, till twelve o’clock at night, the pretty leest.” There were arbours for supper parties; there were also dark paths in the “Wilderness.” Dryden used to take Mrs. Reeve, an actress of Killigrew’s Company, to the Mulberry Gardens. The place was closed about the year 1675. [Illustration: ST. JAMES’S PARK From the Crace Collection in the British Museum.] St. James’s Park began as a marshy piece of ground overflowed by the river at high tides, stretching out between St. James’s Hospital and Thorney Island. The Hospital, founded by the citizens of London “before the time of any man’s memory,” was intended to receive fourteen poor sisters, maidens, who were leprous; they were placed in this house to live chastely and honestly in divine service. It was endowed with land sufficient to maintain these unfortunate women in comfort; they possessed as well a brotherhood of six chaplains and two laymen. And in 1290 Edward the First gave them a fair, to be held for seven days, beginning on St. James’s Eve, July 24. The house is said to be mentioned in an MS. in the Cottonian Library of the year 1100; it was, therefore, certainly the oldest hospital belonging to London. It was rebuilt in the reign of Henry the Third. In 1450, after there had been many disputes with the Abbey of Westminster over alleged rights of visit, Henry the Sixth placed the house in the perpetual custody of Eton College. Henry the Eighth acquired it by purchase in 1537 and, according to Stow, compounded with the inmates. It has been stated that only one sister received a pension. I think the two statements may be reconciled. Thus the dread of leprosy had by this time vanished. There were very few lepers left in the country, if any. At the hospital of Sherburn, Durham, which originally contained five _convents_ of lepers, of both sexes, _i.e._ sixty-five persons, in 1593 the house contained only men; “sick, or whole, Lepers, or wayfaring.” Surtees, _History of Durham_, says that it would have been difficult, long before, to find a single leper in the country.