that road would permit. This house was formerly situated near the bridge which carried the Harrow-road over the bourn; and was, as I conceive, the property described in an Inquisition, held the second year of Edward the sixth,—vide p. 51—as the “two tenements, called the Bridge-House.” There is a younger Lion, “Black,” but still of some pretensions to antiquity, standing in the Uxbridge-road; there is also an ancient “Pack Horse,” in the Harrow-road; and at the corner of Old Church-street, in the Edgeware-road, there is a “Wheat Sheaf,” which has the credit of having frequently entertained honest and learned Ben Johnson; so that, if learning and science were not allowed to flourish in the churches and other public buildings of Paddington, the ale houses, in some degree, attempted to supply the defect. From the _Index Villaris_ of 1690, I find there were “more than three gentlemen’s seats” in Paddington, at that date. Probably there were four—Westbourn Manor House; Paddington Manor House; Desborough House; and Little Shaftsbury House; the two latter names pointing out their original occupants. Although I am not now able to offer any positive evidence in proof of Desborough House having belonged to the celebrated Colonel, who was related to Cromwell, and whose doings in the Commonwealth are so well known, yet I have met with many circumstances which incline me to this belief. Lysons tells us that Little Shaftesbury House was built by “The Earl of Shaftesbury, author of the Characteristics, or his father the Chancellor.” There can be no doubt but the population of Paddington was considerably increased, when the manor and rectory fell into lay hands; and by making the same computation as before—five members for each family, {182b} we shall find that by 1685, it had increased to upwards of three-hundred; for, in the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth Charles the second, sixty-two persons are charged for 267 fire-hearths in Paddington: John Ashley, the gentleman who made the greatest smoke in the parish at that time, being charged for sixteen. John Hubbard is not included in this impost; for he did not live to see all the good results produced by the Restoration, having died, according to his tombstone, in 1665, “aged 111 years.” {183a} Lysons has omitted to notice this patriarch in his list of cases of longevity. “Whether he abstained from doing so, because John was _in some way_ related to the venerable lady of that name, and because his tomb was too well known to require mention, I cannot say. Seeing, however, this tomb exists when others of more recent date are not to be found, I am inclined to believe some such historical interest must have attached to it, or it would have shared the fate of others. At all events, from John’s Diary, if he kept one, many a story as good as Old Mother Hubbard’s could have been made. In another part of the church-yard, on the end of a plain, flat stone, we may read these words:—