The first tributary street we come to is Albemarle Street, formed, at the same time as Bond Street, about 1684, by Sir Thomas Bond, on the site of Clarendon House, which the great Lord Clarendon built from the designs of Pratt, according to Evelyn, on ground which had been granted him by Charles II., in 1664. The Diarist had “never seen a nobler pile,” and he had every opportunity for criticising it thoroughly as, on one occasion, the Chancellor himself showed him all over it; and the extant views of it fully confirm Evelyn’s enthusiasm. The populace, however, saw in the great place the results of bribery and corruption, and Dunkirk House, Holland House, and Tangier House, were titles freely applied to it. On Clarendon’s death, the house was sold (1675) to the second duke of Albemarle (the son of the great Monk) for £26,000 (it had cost £40,000 originally). In consequence of extravagance in all sorts of ways, however, its new owner was not long able to keep it, and he in turn sold it, it is said, for £20,000, to Sir Thomas Bond, who pulled it down and built Albemarle Street (then called Albemarle Buildings), and Bond Street on its site. Evelyn, on September 18th, 1683, notes that he “walked to survey the sad demolition of Clarendon House, that costly and only sumptuous palace of the late Lord Chancellor Hyde,” “where,” he adds, “I have often been so cheerful with him and sometimes so sad.” [Illustration: CLARENDON HOVSE (_From a print of the period._)] Albemarle Street, “of excellent new buildings, inhabited by persons of quality,” as the New View of London (1708) describes it, has had some interesting inhabitants. Here, in 1712, Sir William Wyndham and his family escaped in their night clothes from the fire that destroyed his house, for which he had given £6,000, as he told Swift, when many rare pictures and other valuables were destroyed; here, in Lord Grantham’s house, lived for a time the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., until he moved to Leicester House. Bishop Berkeley was lodging at Mr. Fox’s (an apothecary’s) in this street, from 1724 to 1726, as he records in his “Literary Relics,” and Sir Richard Mead, who formed that fine collection of drawings subsequently added to the Royal Collection, resided here in 1720. Many years later the Duc de Nivernois was lodging in the street, and here received on one occasion Gibbon “more as a man of letters than as a man of fashion,” much to the latter’s chagrin. Lord Bute, another minister who became, as Clarendon had done, an object of popular hatred, was living here in 1764; and there is a story told by Lord Malmesbury, that when a Mr. Calvert asked in the House of Commons “Where is Athens? What is become of Lacedæmon?” some member of the Opposition called out that “they had gone to Albemarle Street.”