Although I can’t say in what year the Duke took up his residence here (it was probably about 1720), he died in 1726, and an advertisement in _The London Gazette_ in the following year contains an intimation to the effect that his Grace’s house was then for disposal, in consequence of his decease. The _Court Guide_ is responsible for the names of other inhabitants, and among them may be noted that Duke of Kingston who married a painfully notorious wife--Miss Chudleigh; and that Countess of Macclesfield who proved such an unnatural mother to Savage, the poet. In 1708, I find Lords Abingdon, Anglesea, and Coningsby mentioned as living in Old Bond Street; some years later the Countess of Gainsborough resided here; but the street as a residential quarter is more interesting from the fact that Laurence Sterne died, at what is the present No. 41, in 1768. The man whose name was on everyone’s lips, and whose extraordinary work was in everyone’s hands, departed to the land of shades with only two hirelings to bid him Godspeed; and one of these alien hands, that of John Macdonald, a footman, has left the description of that last strange scene. “About this time Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street.... I went to Mr. Sterne’s lodgings; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he did. She told me to go up to the nurse; I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said, ‘Now it is come’! He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.” [Illustration: LONG’S HOTEL, BOND STREET.] The ubiquitous Boswell was lodging in Old Bond Street a year after Sterne’s death, and Pascali Paoli, whose name looms largely in Boswell’s “voluminous page,” had already come here some eight years earlier. Gibbon, on his return from Lausanne, also lodged in Bond Street, where he writes: “While coaches were rattling through Bond Street, I have passed many a solitary evening in my lodgings with my books”; while half a century earlier Mrs. Loe, a friend of Lady Wentworth’s, was residing here, in 1710, and we find the old gossip visiting her and subsequently informing her son that “she (Mrs. L.) had ten wax candles, six in one room and fower in a very little one and very fynly furnished,” to her ladyship’s evident astonishment. At No. 24, the Artists’ Benevolent Institution was housed, in 1814; but this particular building is more interesting still from the fact that, in 1791, it was the residence--one of his many in London--of Sir Thomas Lawrence; while Northcote, the artist, at No. 2, in 1781, and Ozias Humphrey, the miniature painter, at No. 13, in 1796, combine with Lawrence, to represent Art here.