The earlier mansion had been the home of the Bishop of Norwich in Henry VIII.’s time, of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, of the Archbishop of York, who gave the house its name, and of Sir Francis Bacon who loved the place and only left it for the Tower. In 1672 the second York House was sold for £30,000, with the stipulation that the streets built on the site were to be given the Duke’s names. They are quite easy to trace: there is George Court, with the George Tavern, where you may eat your chop to the sound of an orchestra of singing birds; hard by are Villiers and Duke Streets; “Of” Lane has been rechristened York Place,--and now we are back in Buckingham Street. The new quarter soon had famous tenants. John Evelyn lived for a year in Villiers Street, and forty years later Sir Richard Steele had a house there. No. 14, Buckingham Street, has been much remodelled since Samuel Pepys lived there and walked down the steps of the water gate on his way to visit his friend Mr. Cole in Brentford. There is a tablet on the house to tell the passer-by that the Earl of Oxford, William Etty and Clarkson Stanfield, the marine painter, also lived here. The house opposite looks far more modern, but within the very new outer walls of the offices of the Royal National Pension Fund for Nurses are preserved much of the exquisite carving, ceiling paintings, and elaborate stucco work that belong to the time when Peter the Great, Czar of all the Russias, came over to England in 1698 and lodged in these very rooms. David Hume, Rousseau, Fielding and Black all lived at No. 15, now incorporated in No. 16, but the Dickens lover will ignore these famous names and only remember that the rooms at the top of the house are the very ones taken by Miss Betsy Trotwood for David Copperfield. With the exception perhaps of that Shah of Persia who spent a happy holiday in England in the reign of the late Queen Victoria, I suppose we never had a more eccentric royal visitor than Peter the Great. No doubt that is the reason why the memories of his brief stay here still seem to cling about so many parts of London. This strange being, half-barbarian, half-genius, had great ambitions and achieved them. As Voltaire says: “He gave a polish to his people and was himself a savage; he taught them the art of war, of which he was himself ignorant; inspired by the sight of a small boat on the river Moskwa, he erected a powerful fleet and made himself an expert and active shipwright, pilot, sailor and commander; he changed the manners, customs and laws of the Russians, and lives in their memory as the father of his country.”