On an old tracing of the Hospital boundaries kept in its archives, I found this inscription: “To answer the Earl of Ranelagh’s house on the east side of the College, an house was builded in the Earl of Orford’s garden on the west side.” This was the house into which Sir Robert Walpole moved from his lodgings near by, where now Walpole Street runs; the same lodgings in which the Earl of Sandwich had lived long before. The Edward Montague, who, as Commander of the fleet, brought Charles II. back to England, was made Earl of Sandwich for this service, and in 1663 he came to live in Chelsea, “to take the ayre.” But there was a “Mrs. Betty Becke,” his landlady’s daughter, who seems to have been the real reason for this retirement, and at whom the moral Pepys sneers as “a slut.” He writes under date of September 9, 1663: “I am ashamed to see my lord so grossly play the fool, to the flinging off of all honour, friends, and servants, and everything and person that is good, with his carrying her abroad, and playing on the lute under her window, and forty other poor sordid things, which I am grieved to hear.” Having occasion to visit his chief here, on naval business, the Clerk of the Admiralty finds him “all alone, with one joynte of meat, mightily extolling the manner of his retirement, and the goodness of his diet;” and was so perturbed, and so loyal withal, as to dare to write him, “that her wantonness occasioned much scandal, though unjustly, to his Lordship.” Nor was his Lordship offended by this frankness, but remained friendly to his Secretary. Crossing through court and quadrangle and garden, to the western side of the Hospital, we are allowed to enter its infirmary, and to pass into ward No. 7. Here we stand in Sir Robert Walpole’s dining-room, unchanged since he left it, except that the array of fine Italian pictures has gone from the walls, and that decrepid soldiers lie about on cots, coughing and drinking gruel from mugs. But for all this, perhaps by reason of all this, this room, with its heavily moulded ceiling, its stately marble mantle—in severe white throughout—is one of the most impressive relics of by-gone grandeur in all London. The house, grand in its day, grand still in its mutilation, was built by Sir John Vanbrugh, whose architecture—florid and faulty, but with a dignity of its own, such as strikes one in his masterpiece, Blenheim, called by Thackeray “a piece of splendid barbarism”—was as heavy as his comedies were light; and served to bring on him Swift’s epitaph: “Lie heavy on him earth, for he Hath laid many a heavy load on thee.”