Beyond Oxford Street are collected a great number of squares in the district of Bloomsbury. They are all surrounded by solid, well-built houses, which seem to hold their own with dignity, even though fashion has moved away from them westward. Before the squares arose, this was the site of two great palaces with their gardens. One of them, Southampton House, afterwards known as Bedford or Russell House, was where Bloomsbury Square now is. In 1665, February 9, Evelyn notes that he “dined at my Lord Treasurer’s the Earl of Southampton, in Bloomsbury, where he was building a noble square or piazza, a little town; his own house stands too low--some noble rooms, a pretty cedar chapel, a naked garden to the North, but good air.” This house was pulled down in 1800, and Russell Square was built on the garden. Both Bloomsbury, or Southampton Square, as it was sometimes called, and Russell Square have good trees, and in each garden there is a statue by Westmacott. Charles James Fox, seated in classical drapery, erected in 1816, looks down Bedford Place, where stood Southampton House, towards the larger statue, with elaborate pedestal and cupids, of Francis, Duke of Bedford, in Russell Square. This is one of London’s largest Squares, being only about 140 feet smaller than Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and included most of the garden of Southampton House, with its fine limes, and a large locust-tree, _Robinia pseudo acacia_. The laying out is more original in design than most of the squares, having been done by Repton in 1810. In Repton’s book on Landscape Gardening he goes fully into his reasons for the design of Russell Square. “The ground,” he said, “had all been brought to one level plain at too great expense to admit of its being altered.” He approves of the novel plan of placing the statue at the edge instead of in the usual position in the centre of the Square. “To screen the broad gravel-walk from the street, a compact hedge is intended to be kept clipt to about six feet high; this, composed of privet and hornbeam, will become almost as impervious as a hedge of laurels, or other evergreens, which will not succeed in a London atmosphere.” He says he has not “clothed the lawn” with plantation, so that children playing there could be seen from the windows, to meet “the particular wishes of some mothers.” “The outline of this area is formed by a walk under two rows of lime-trees, regularly planted at equal distances, not in a perfect circle, but finishing towards the statue in two straight lines.” He imagines that fanciful advocates of landscape gardening will object to this as too formal, and be “further shocked” by learning that he hoped they would be kept cut and trimmed. Within were to be “groves in one quarter of the area, the other three enriched with flowers and shrubs, each disposed in a different manner, to indulge the various tastes for regular or irregular gardens.” He ends his description