. . . “everything by starts and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was Chymist, Fidler, Statesman, and Buffoon. * * * * Beggar’d by fools, when still he found too late He had his jest and they had his estate.” And Pope tells us, in his stinging verse, how “this lord of useless thousands ends” his ignoble life, deserted and despised: “In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half hung, The floor of plaister and the walls of dung, On once a flock bed, but repair’d with straw, With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw; The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red; Great Villiers lies!” It was the Earl of Bristol who bought the place from Buckingham, and it is at this time that we meet with a notice of it in Evelyn’s diary under the date 15th January, 1678–9: “Went with my Lady Sunderland to Chelsey and dined with the Countesse of Bristol in the greate house, formerly the Duke of Buckingham’s, a spacious and excellent place, for the extent of ground and situation in good aire. The house is large but ill-contrived.” In 1682 the Marquis of Worcester, afterwards Duke of Beaufort, became the owner of the mansion; and from him it was named Beaufort House, thereafter always called so. He selected this place that he might live, says Strype, “in an air he thought much healthier, and near enough to the town for business.” In 1738 Sir Hans Sloane bought the house and soon after pulled it down; giving the famous Inigo Jones-gateway to the Earl of Burlington, who removed it to Chiswick, where it stands to-day in the gardens of the Duke of Devonshire’s Chiswick House, not far from the statue of the architect. It was on meeting its disjointed stones, as they were being carted away, that Alexander Pope wrote the well-known lines: _Passenger_: “O Gate, how com’st thou here?” _Gate_: “I was brought from Chelsea last year, Batter’d with wind and weather; Inigo Jones put me together; Sir Hans Sloane Let me alone; Burlington brought me hither.”