Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

s inferior books. I don't think any man of letters has ever rented a house in Park Lane, except Disraeli, and he went there as a successful politician; such glorious thoroughfare

rke made his home there; Hazlitt died in Frith Street; Mulready the painter had his studio in Broad Street; and the sculptor, James Northcote, resided for over thirty years in Argyll Place. When Madame de Stael was in England she stayed at 30 (now 29) Argyll Street, and Byron speak

nder-hearted of street-walkers, Ann, whose surname he never knew, and to whose compassion and charity he always felt that he owed his life: "For many weeks I had walked at nights with this poor friendless girl up and down Oxford Street, or had rested with her on steps and under the shelter of porticoes. She could not be so old as myself; she told me, indeed, that she had not completed her sixteenth year.... One night when we were pacing slowly along Oxford Street, and after a day when I had felt more than usually ill and faint, I requested her to turn off with me into Soho Square. Thither we went, and we sat down on the steps of a house which to this h

hing of his debt to her, and arranged that three nights from then, and every night after until they should meet, she would be at the corner of Titchfield Street, Soho. On his return to London

amed Pyment, and only came and went to and from his office by stealth because he was deep in debts and continually dodging the bailiffs. A few weeks of lodging miserably here nearly exhausted the little cash De Quincey had brought to London with him, and he had to give up his room. But he explained his position frankly to Brunell-Brown, and t

e time before I came; and great joy the poor creature expressed when she found that I was in future to be her companion through the hours of darkness. The house was large, and from the want of furniture the noise of the rats made a prodigious echoing on the spacious staircase and hall; and amidst the real fleshly ills of cold and, I fear, hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer still more (it appeared) from the self-created one of ghosts. I promised her protection against all ghosts whatsoever, but, alas! I could offer her n

EY'S HOU

road from the place where he had slept. During his breakfast I generally contrived a reason for lounging in, and with an air of as much indifference as I could assume, took up such fragments as he had left; sometimes, indeed, there were none at all.... As to the poor child, she was never admitted into his study (if I may give that name to his chief depository of parchments, law writings, &c.); that room was to her the Bluebeard room of the house, being regularly locked on his departure to dinner, about six o'clock, which usually was his final departure for the night. Whether the child were an illegitimate daughter of Mr. Brunell-Brown, or only a servant, I could not ascertain; she did no

OUSE. POLAN

me," says De Quincey, "he was obliging and, to the extent of his power, generous." He goes on to say that in after years, whenever he was in London, he never failed to visit that house in Greek Street, and "about ten o'clock this very night, August 15, 1821-being my birthday-I turned aside from my evening walk down Oxford Street, purposely to take a glance at it; it is now occupied by a respectable family, and by the lights in the front drawing-room I observed a domestic party a

S DE

mself and his guardians, and he was sent to Oxford-his quarr

, "Medwin, let me in. I am expelled," and after a loud sort of half-hysterical laugh repeat, "I am expelled," and add "for atheism." After breakfast they went out to look for lodgings, and, says Hogg, "never was a young beauty so capricious, so hard to please" as Shelley; but the name of Poland Street attracted him because it suggested recollections of Thaddeus of Warsaw and freedom,

ght be, and was secretly supported by his sisters, who sent their pocket-money round to him by the hand of their schoolfellow, Harriett W

ff all relations with Hogg and place himself under a tutor of his fat

pain to wound 'the sense of duty to your own character, to that of your family, and feelings as a Christian,' decidedly to refuse my assent to both the proposals in your

B. Sh

eet, and as Dr. Dowden sets forth in his Life of the poet, dispatched a letter thence to Harriett, her father's house in Aldford Street being close handy, telling her at what hour he would have a hackney coach waiting for her at the door of the co

MARCHMO

h Mary Godwin. Meanwhile, however, returning to London after his marriage to Harriett, Shelley stayed for a few days at the house of his father-in-law, and then at Cooke's Hotel, in Albe

Lamb's but a finer intellect; he has never to this day received his full meed of recognition. He moves in spirit among the immortals as apart and unsociable as he moved among them in the body. "We are told," wrote P. G. Patmore, "that on the summit of one of those columns which form the magnificent ruins of Hadrian's Temple, in the plain of Athens, there used to dwell a hermit who scarcely ever descended from this strangely-chosen abode, owing his scanty food and support to the mingled admiration and curiosity of the peasants who inhabited the plain below. Something like this was the position of William Hazlitt. Self-banished from the social world, no less by the viole

e in those of a fiery and unruly horse. His eyes were not good. They were never brilliant, and there was a furtive and at times a sinister look about them as they glanced suspiciously from under their overhanging brows." Other contemporaries have described him as a grave man, diffident, almost

HOUSE. FRI

ks. Nearing the close, he begged that his mother might be sent for, but she was an old lady of eighty-four living in Devonshire and was unable to go to him. "He died so quietly," in the words of his grandson, "that his son, who was sitting by his bedside, did not know that he was gone till the vital breath had been extinct a moment or two. His last words were, 'Well, I've had a

position, stands back against the wall of the church: the stone originally bore a curious, somewhat militant inscription, but this