“THE LATE Countess of Kent’s powder has been lately experimented upon divers infected persons with admirable success. The virtues of it against the Plague and all malignant distempers are sufficiently known to all the Physicians of Christendom, and the Powder itself prepared by the only person living that has the true Receipt, is to be had at the third part of the ordinary price at Mr Calvert’s, at the Feathers in the old Pall Mall near St James’s,” &c. This, and other advertisements announcing equally efficacious panacea, appeared daily in the London papers during the plague of 1665. De Foe, in his little chronicle of the plague, often speaks of these quack medicines. Less dismal images are called up by “the Feathers at the side of Leicester Fields,” which sign was evidently complimentary to its neighbour Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of George II., who lived at Leicester House, “the pouting house of princes,” when on bad terms with his father, and died there in 1751. The back parlour of this tavern was for some years the meeting-place of a club of artists and well-known amateurs, amongst whom Stuart, the Athenian traveller; Scott, the marine painter; Luke Sullivan, the miniature artist, engraver of the March to Finchley; burly Captain Grose, author of the “Antiquities of England,” and the greatest wit of his day; Mr Hearne, the antiquary; Nathaniel Smith, the father of J. T. Smith; Mr John Ireland, then a watchmaker in Maidenlane, and afterwards editor of Boydell’s edition of Dr Trusler’s “Hogarth Moralised,” and several others. When this house was taken down to make way for Dibdin’s theatre, called the Sans-souci, the club adjourned to the COACH AND HORSES, in Castle Street, Leicester Fields. But, in consequence of the members not proving customers sufficiently expensive for that establishment, the landlord one evening venturing to let them out with a farthing candle, they betook themselves to Gerard Street and thence to the BLUE POSTS in Dean Street, where the club dwindled to two or three members and at last died out. An amusing anecdote is told about the Feathers, Grosvenor Street West. A lodge of Oddfellows was held at this house, into the private chamber of which George, Prince of Wales, one night intruded very abruptly with a roystering friend. The society was, at the moment, celebrating some of its awful mysteries, which no uninitiated eye may behold, and these were witnessed by the profane intruders. The only way to repair the sacrilege was to make the Prince and his companion “Oddfellows,” a title they certainly deserved as richly as any members of the club. The initiatory rites were quickly gone through, and the Prince was chairman for the remainder of the evening. In 1851 the old public-house was pulled down and a new gin palace built on its site, in the parlour of which the chair used by the distinguished Oddfellow is still preserved, along with a portrait of his Royal Highness in the robes of the order.