Buckingham Street is hallowed by the memory of many celebrities. Here, at the last house on the west facing the river (since rebuilt, and now numbered 14), Samuel Pepys lived from 1684 to 1700. Pepys, unfortunately, had finished his _Diary_ in 1669, or we should have had some quaint observations from him in reference to his residence here. The house had been occupied previously by his great friend, William Hewer, at whose residence in Clapham the genial gossip died in 1703. No. 14 was the home of William Etty, R.A., from the summer of 1824 until shortly before his death in 1849. He first occupied the ground floor, but he moved to the top rooms, as he loved to watch the sunsets over the Thames. The ebb and flow of the river, he declared, was like life, and "the view from Lambeth to the Abbey not unlike Venice. Here he invited Thomas Stothard, the famous painter, to breakfast at nine o'clock, when there is a good light to see my Venetian studies of colour, which are all hung round the room where I breakfast." In these rooms, "the artists of two generations have assembled--Fuseli, Flaxman, Holland, Constable, and Hilton--then Turner, Maclise, Dyce, Herbert, and all the younger race."[61] Clarkson Stanfield, the landscape painter, who designed some beautiful scenery for Drury Lane and painted a drop-scene for Dickens, occupied the lower rooms for some years. "Should my reader's boat ever stop at York Water Gate," wrote J.T. Smith, in his _Book for a Rainy Day_, "let me request him to look up at the three upper balconied windows of that mass of building at the south-west corner of Buckingham Street. Those, and the two adjoining Westminster, give light to chambers occupied by that truly epic historical painter, and most excellent man, Etty, the Royal Academician, who has fitted up the balconied room with engravings after pictures of the three great masters, Raphael, Nicholas Poussin, and Rubens. The other two windows illuminate his painting room, in which his mind and colours resplendently shine, even in the face of one of the grandest scenes in Nature, our River Thames and City edifices, with a most luxuriant and extensive face of a distant country, the beauties of which he most liberally delights in showing to his friends from the leads of his apartments.... The rooms immediately below Mr Etty's are occupied by Mr Lloyd, a gentleman whose general knowledge in the graphic art I and many more look up to with the profoundest respect. The chambers beneath Mr Lloyd's are inhabited by Mr Stanfield, the landscape painter."