spot, where by her mother's grave (see GODWIN, p. 118) Mary was fond of sitting with her book or her work. Of this marriage Godwin wrote:

William

Friends and Contemporaries, vol. ii. chap. ix.

The piece of news, however, I have to tell you, is that I went to church with this same tall girl some little Godwin, his time ago to be married. Her husband is the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, in the County of Sussex, Baronet; so that, according to the vulgar ideas of the world, she is well married, and I have great hopes the young man will make her a good husband.

WILLIAM SHENSTONE.

1714-1763.

6

HENSTONE, at one time, lodged in Jermyn Street; and in 1740 dated his letters from the house of Mr. Wintle, Perfumer, near Temple Bar,' probably in Butcher Row (see LEE, p. 196).

The greater part of his life was spent in Shropshire; his occasional resting-place in town being the George Coffee House, afterwards numbered 213 Strand, near Essex Street, upon the site of which a modern tavern bearing the same name has been erected (see MURPHY, p. 227). It was at this inn that his warmest welcome' was found. " his letters he says:

In one of

What do you think must be my expense, who love to pry into everything of the kind? Why, truly, one shilling. My company goes to George's Coffee House, where for that small subscription I read all pamphlets under a three-sbilling dimension.

WH

RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN.

1751-1816.

THEN Sheridan and Miss Linley fled to London, they took refuge in the house of an oilman, at the Holborn end of Featherstone Buildings. The proprietor was the godfather of Charles Lamb, who relates in the Essay 'My First Play,' how his father and mother were playing quadrille when Sheridan arrived that evening with his harmonious charge.' Featherstone Buildings, little changed in 1885, was opposite the Great Turnstile.

Sheridan's first duel with Mathews, interrupted at Hyde Park, near the Hercules' Pillars, an inn just east of the present Apsley House (see SAVAGE, p. 261), was followed by a second at the Castle Tavern in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, of which no trace remains now.

Sheridan was entered a student at the Middle Temple in 1772. In 1773 he and his wife were living in Orchard Street, Portman Square, where he wrote 'The Rivals,' produced in January, 1775, and 'The Duenna,' brought out in November of the same year. Of his home life almost nothing is known; and it is only from his own letters and from those addressed to him, that any hint is found as to his divers places of abode in London.

In 1778 his address was Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields; in 1792, Lower Grosvenor Street, New Bond Street; in 1793, No. 10 Hertford Street, Mayfair ;** in 1804, Somerset Place, Portman Square; in 1810, Queen Street, Mayfair. He died in 1816 at No. 14 Savile Row, Burlington Gardens, in the house marked by the tablet of the Society of Arts; and he is supposed to have lived for a short

time at No. 17 Saville Row, where half a century later was carefully kept a cast of his hand, with the inscription, — 'Good at a fight, better at a play,

Godlike in giving; but the Devil to pay.'

Sheridan's ghost is believed to haunt a certain upper back room in this house; and during its occupancy by the Saville Club, the scratching of his pen, it is said, was often heard in the silence of the early morning hours.

He was buried from the house of his friend Mr. Peter Moore, in Great George Street, Westminster, 'in the only spot that remained unoccupied in Poets' Corner.'

In 1815. Sheridan was arrested for debt and taken to a 'lock-up house' in Took's Court, Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane.

February 7.-Fox never wrote his speeches, was fond of preparing them in travelling, as he said a post-chaise was the best Greville Me- place to arrange his thoughts in. Sheridan wrote and moirs, 1836. prepared a great deal, and generally in bed, with his books, pen, and ink on the bed, where he would lie all day.

Sheridan's clubs were Brooks's, still at No. 60 St. James's Street in 1885, and the Eccentric, which met first in a tavern in Chandos Street, Covent Garden, then at the Crown in Vinegar Yard, Drury Lane, --taken down some years ago, and later at Tom Rees's, in May's Buildings, where it flourished as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. May's Buildings is a short street connecting St. Martin's Lane with Bedfordbury.

Immediately after the brilliant success of 'The Rivals,' Sheridan was proposed by Dr. Johnson himself, and elected, a member of The Club (see GOLDSMITH, p. 123).

He was a frequenter of the Bedford Coffee House, in the Piazza, Covent Garden (see CHURCHILL, p. 51); the One Tun Tavern, in St. James's Market, Jermyn Street, near the Haymarket, and long since taken down; and, according to