We have noted elsewhere that Oliver Goldsmith had lodgings in a cottage near a place called The Priory at Kilburn. Poor Goldy had retired thither with the intention of practically studying the habits of some of the animals he was writing of in his ‘Animated Nature.’ His range of subjects must have been necessarily restricted, for, beyond the humble farmyard of his landlord, the rusticity of Kilburn appears at that point of time to have been limited to cow-keepers and market-gardens. It had an evil fame for dog-fights and pugilistic encounters, at which Hogarth is said to have been a frequent spectator—not from a love of such sights, but with a view to the work of humanity he was then doing, in displaying the coarse brutality and repulsively cruel features of those so-called sports with all the realism of his caustic pencil. Many years later Kilburn lay heavy on the minds of the Middlesex magistrates, and during the first half of the present century its reputation was decidedly low, and its inhabitants, or the additional ones they sheltered, a frequent trouble to the constables of those days. Time and the builders have amended all that, and the village of Kilburn is (1860) partly a suburb of genteel villas, and a struggling ground for newly-started professional men and tradesmen of large hope and small capital, with ultimate success as the prize for those who can play a losing game longest. Before leaving Kilburn I may add that, in the spring of 1878, when the work of widening the London and North-Eastern Railway was going on at Kilburn, the workmen came upon a curious brass coffin-plate, bearing an effigy supposed to be that of an Abbess of Kilburn Nunnery. The nuns gave a touching reason for the dilapidated condition of their house (which lay close to the highway for wayfarers and pilgrims to the shrine of St. Alban’s) in the daily charity of the poor sisters to those of the poorer sort, a charge they were ill able to bear; and this fact, in connection with the well-known poverty of their house, exempted them from taxes to the Crown, which recompensed itself at the dissolution of the religious houses by taking the whole of the little they possessed. At this time the buildings of the priory consisted of the hall, the chamber next the church, the middle chamber between that and the Prioress’s chamber; the buttery, pantry, and cellar; the inner chamber to the Prioress’s room, the chamber between the latter and the hall, the kitchen, the larder-house, the brewhouse and bakehouse, the three chambers for the chaplain and the hinds or husbandmen, the confessor’s chamber, and the church. The orchard and cemetery, valued at ‘xx_s._ by the yere, and one horse of the coller of black at vs. For all these chambers 2 bedsteads of bordes, 1 featherbed, 2 matteres, 2 old coverlettes, 3 wollen blanketts, a _syller_ of old stained work, and 2 pieces of old hangings paynted,’ appear a sparse allowance of comfort. They were better off in the matter