Hooke appears to have made a considerable fortune as a surveyor, and he is credited with the design of three important buildings, all of which have disappeared. One of these was Montagu House, in Bloomsbury, for Ralph, Lord Montagu, whose country house at Boughton is presently to be described. Hooke’s house did not last long; it was begun in 1675 and burnt down in 1686, its successor being designed by the French architect, Puget, whom Lord Montagu may have known during his long residence in France. The second building ascribed to Hooke is the old Bethlem Hospital, likewise begun in 1675 and pulled down in 1814 (Fig. 116); and the third is Aske’s Hospital at Hoxton, begun about 1688. Engravings of the last two buildings (there is no record of the first Montagu House) do not lead to the opinion that Hooke was a great master of architecture, although it is true that the long front of Bethlem Hospital is handled in a simple, straightforward manner. He was far behind Wren, but he is interesting as being another whose training led him, under the special conditions of the time, into active practice. [Illustration: FIG. 118.--SOUTH OR PRINCIPAL FRONT OF ALBEMARLE HOUSE, LONDON, 1664. From an Engraving by R. Sawyer, Jun.] Lord Chancellor Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, built a fine house during the heyday of his prosperity, on a site in Piccadilly, opposite the top of St James’s Street (Fig. 118). It was highly extolled by Evelyn (especially when writing to Lord Cornbury, the chancellor’s eldest son), and after him by Pepys, who went to see it, “hearing so much from Mr. Evelyn of it.” He declared it to be the finest pile he ever did see, and on a subsequent visit he climbed with some trouble to the top, and there found the noblest prospect that ever he saw, Greenwich being nothing to it. The engraving hardly bears out this extravagant praise, but it must have been a stately house. The architect was Roger Pratt, afterwards knighted, another of the men whom the great fire appears to have brought into the service of architecture.[58] Evelyn mentions him more than once; he was a fellow commissioner of his in the inquiry as to the rebuilding of St Paul’s, and Evelyn had met him years before in Italy. The house was begun in 1664, and was approaching completion in November 1666. But misfortune dogged it from the outset. The populace, with whom Clarendon was no favourite, dubbed it Dunkirk House, in allusion to his supposed connection with the sale of that town to the French. The chancellor occupied it but a single year before he fled the country; his son occupied it for another year or two, and it was then let on lease to the Duke of Ormond. After Clarendon’s death at the end of 1674, it was sold to the second Duke of Albemarle, and became known as Albemarle House; he again sold it some three years later to a kind of building syndicate, who in a few years pulled it down and laid out its site and the surrounding land in streets, one of which was called