since 1780, when the founder, M. Fribourg, retired. One of the present partners, Mr. George Evans, has written a delightful monograph on the Old Snuff House of Fribourg and Treyer, "At the Rasp and Crown, at the upper End of the Haymarket, London." It is a charming book, filled with illustrations and reminiscences of the leisurely days before the arrival of the departmental store, when an oldestablished firm had time to have intimate courtly relations with its customers. What Lord Petersham could now change his mind and return 216 pounds of anything and be urbanely credited with £75 12s.; and do grateful customers now make presents of gold-lined amboyna snuff boxes to mark their satisfaction? If they do, I am as ignorant of the fact as the ordinary pedestrian of the historical interest of the unnoticed shop he passes daily on his way to Piccadilly Circus. A KING IN SOHO "Man calleth thee his wealth, who made thee rich And while he digs out thee, falls in the ditch." GEORGE HERBERT. Few Londoners can tell you where a king lies buried in Soho. Shelley may have been thinking of him when he gave his mad invitation to the old lady in the Highgate bus, to "sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings," but if so his knowledge is not shared by many people. If I have made you curious, walk along Coventry Street from Piccadilly Circus, leaving Leicester Square, that "pouting-place of princes," on your right, and turn up Wardour Street past Lisle Street and Gerrard Street that was fashionable in Charles II.'s day and where Dryden and Burke and Lord Mohun lived and where Johnson and Reynolds founded the Literary Club that still exists in another meeting-place. Then, crossing Shaftesbury Avenue, you will come to the old graveyard at the back of the church of St. Anne, which is now a playground and only open till four in the winter months and during the hours of service on Sundays. On the wall you will find a tablet to the memory of the unlucky Theodore, King of Corsica, who fled from France, a bankrupt, only to be seized on his arrival in London and flung into the Fleet prison. "Near this place," runs the inscription, "is interred Theodore, King of Corsica, who died in this neighbourhood Dec. 11, 1756, immediately after leaving the King's Bench Prison by the Benefit of the Act of Insolvency. In consequence of which he registered his Kingdom of Corsica for the use of his Creditors." To which Horace Walpole has appended the following stanza: The grave, great Teacher, to a level brings The kindly soul who bailed out fallen Majesty a fortnight before his death and then gave him decent burial, was, according to the verger of St. Anne, an Italian candle merchant from Old Compton Street, on the site of whose shop is now that excellent non-profiteering restaurant known as Le Dîner Français. But I prefer, with the Blue Book, to think that the Samaritan was a tailor, grown rich, perhaps, snipping the embroidered waistcoats of H.R.H. Frederick, Prince of Wales, when the latter squabbled with his royal parents and removed in a pettish mood to Leicester House hard by. The only other interesting things I could find in this old church were the tomb of Hazlitt, immediately below King Theodore's memorial stone, the old wooden drain pipes, lately disinterred, that lie on the Shaftesbury Avenue side of the church, and the tablet within, to the memory of" The Beloved Mother-in-Law." St. Anne's was built in 1685, a significant year in the annals of this neighbourhood. It was the date of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which sent the Huguenots flocking to London, to take up their residence here, and of the Battle of Sedgemoor, when the Duke of Monmouth, who had a mansion in the Square, used as his watchword the cry So Ho!" and unconsciously christened the whole district. A CHAPTER III TRAFALGAR SQUARE TO FLEET STREET "For such things do go on in Fleet Street as no man has written yet." RICHARD JEfferies. ONE of the most enthralling and endearing things about London is the way the memory of the great people, whose names are so familiar that you feel you would know their bearers if you met them, pervades the city and crops up in such very unexpected places. If business ever took you through that evil-smelling fishy Lower Thames Street, you would discover that Chaucer lived there for six years when he was Comptroller of the Petty Customs in the Port of London. You stroll through the little Cloisters in Westminster Abbey, of all places in the world, and some one tells you that Lady Hamilton once lived in the Littlington Tower, when she was servant to Mr. Hare and had no thought that she would ever inspire a hero to great victories. You think that when you have seen Sir Thomas More's tomb in Chelsea Old Church, and Crosby Hall near by, you have exhausted the souvenirs of his life, but you find him again in Westminster Hall, where he was condemned to death-in the Deanery where he spent two months in charge of the Abbot of Westminster, -in Lincoln's Inn-in Milk Street in the City, where he was born, "the brightest star that ever shone in that Via Lactea "-in the church of St. Lawrence Jewry where he lectured, and in the Tower where he died. Dr. Johnson, of course, was ubiquitous. He went everywhere and usually said something noteworthy about everything. One of the great difficulties in writing this book has been to refrain from quoting him too frequently, and Pepys is even worse. The kindly official in the Clothworkers' Hall (where I lunched once on a special occasion) said to me: "Samuel Pepys, Ma'am, Pepys the great Diarist-you may have heard of him," and I felt like replying: My good man, I have been with your Pepys through Chelsea-and in St. Margaret's, Westminster, where he was married-I have seen his portrait at the Royal Society Rooms in Burlington House and his house in Buckingham Street -the church of St. Bride, where his birth was registered-St. Lawrence Jewry, where he was disappointed with Wilkins' sermon - All Hallows, Barking, that, as he wrote on the 5th September, 1666, only just escaped the Great Fire his parish church of St. Olave's, where he worshipped, and Hyde Park, where he used to go driving with his wife." THE STRAND Through the long Strand together let us stray, GAY. Of all delightful places to meet memories of famous bygone people, the most intriguing is |