The old Mall, and the old game that was played there, dated back to James I. There was a “Pell Mell Close” planted with apple-trees that gave the name to Apple-Tree Yard, St. James’s Square. The houses had been built on both sides of the Old Mall;—“The Pall Mall,” as it was called, or “Pall Mall Walk,” or “The Pavement.” Its double row of seventy elm trees—140 trees in all—running its length, from the Haymarket to St. James’s, may well have been the “living gallery of aged trees,” in Waller’s poem of 1661. Lady Ranelagh’s house was one of those on the south side, at the west end, of the Mall; houses advertised as “on the Park side, with Gardens or Mounts adjoining to the Royal Gardens.” There were various interesting inhabitants of the Mall about the time that Boyle went to live there with Lady Ranelagh. Dr. Sydenham, the fashionable London physician, had been living there since 1658—an old friend of theirs: one of the great Dorsetshire Puritan family of Sydenhams, of whom the doctor’s brother, the Parliamentarian Colonel Sydenham, was the chief. Mrs. Knight the singer, and Dr. Isaac Barrow the divine, and the notorious Countess of Southesk who figures in the Memoirs of Grammont, were all living in the Mall. There were taverns, too, and shops, with signboards: “The King’s Head,” and “The Two Golden Balls.” And Pall Mall was Clubland, even then: “Wood’s at the Pell Mell, our old house for clubbing,” wrote Pepys in 1660. But in 1670, after Boyle went to live there, it was still a rural, leafy little suburb of fashionable London, between Whitehall and St. James’s Palace, nestled among the old trees, under the very shadow of Westminster Abbey and Westminster Palace; the Painted Chamber, and the Star Chamber, and St. Stephen’s Chapel—“_That house where all our ills were shaped_,” as Waller called it,—after the Restoration. So rural was the Old Mall, that Dr. Sydenham used to sit smoking his pipe at his open window looking on to the Pavement, with a silver tankard of ale on the window-sill; and when once a thief ran off with the doctor’s tankard, thief and tankard alike were lost “in the bushes of Bond Street.”[325]