Before the erection of the palaces along the riverside the fishermen of the Thames lived beside the river bank at Charing Cross. A piece of ground in the churchyard of St. Martin's was set apart for their use and kept separate. Meantime, as one after the other of the Bishops' town-houses were built, the fishermen found themselves pushed farther up the river, until finally they were fairly driven away, and established themselves at Lambeth, where the last of them lived in the early part of the nineteenth century. Their burial-ground, meantime, was preserved even after they had disappeared. The churchyard of St. Martin's was curtailed in 1826, and the parish burial-ground removed to Pratt Street, Camden Town. Behind the National Gallery is the National Portrait Gallery, opened in 1896, and opposite to it St. Martin's Town Hall, with the parish emblem--St. Martin dividing his cloak with a beggar--in bas-relief on the frontage. Charing Cross Road is very modern. It was opened in 1887, and swept over a number of narrow courts and alleys. For St. Martin's Lane, see p. 16. In this is the Public Library, where some watercolours and old prints of vanished houses are hung on the staircase. There is also the eighteenth-century plan from Strype's Survey, well worth studying. Leicester Square, at first known as Leicester Fields, is associated with the Sidneys, Earls of Leicester, who had a town-house on the north side, where the Empire Music-hall is now. This was a large brick building, with a courtyard before it and a Dutch garden at the back. During the reign of Charles I. and in the time of the Commonwealth the Sidneys tenanted it, but later it was occupied by foreign Ambassadors. Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, took it in 1662, and afterwards it was aptly described by Pennant as "the pouting-place of Princes"; for George, son of George I., established here a rival Court when he had quarrelled with his father, and his son Frederick, the Prince of Wales, did precisely the same thing. During the latter tenancy a large building adjoining, called Savile or Ailesbury House, was amalgamated with Leicester House. George III. was living here when hailed King. Savile House stood until the Gordon Riots, when it was completely stripped and gutted by the rioters. The square was presented to the public in 1874 by Baron Albert Grant, M.P. The gift is recorded on the pedestal of the statue of Shakespeare standing in the centre. The square was for long a favourite place for duels. A line drawn diagonally from the north-east to the south-west corner roughly indicates the boundary of St Martin's parish, the upper half of the square being in St. Anne's, Soho.