watchword on the night of Sedgemoor was 'Soho,' and was unchanged in 1885. Some years before his death, Colman lived in retirement in Richmond, a short distance west of Richmond Bridge, and he died in a retreat for the insane at Paddington. He was buried in the Church of St. Mary the Vírgin, Kensington High Street. The old church has been removed, but a tablet to Colman's memory is to be found in the north transept of the new building erected on its site.

Loftie's

History of London, vol. ii. chap. xxi.

Kensington Church, as I remember it in my boyhood, was one of the few really picturesque buildings of the kind near London. It was, of course, by no means worthy of a parish which can boast of such aristocratic residents and neighbors as the Kensington of to-day, but it harmonized well with what is left of Old Kensington Square. . . . The old church, with its quaint curved gable to the street corner, and its well-weathered red brick, has also disappeared.

Colman frequented Tom's Coffee House, No. 17 Russell Street, Covent Garden (see CIBBER). Among other clubs, he was a member of the Beefsteak Club, which met in Covent Garden Theatre (see CHURCHILL), and of the Dilettanti Society, which met, in Colman's day, at Parsloe's, St. James's Street, a tavern familiar to the literary men of more than one generation. It disappeared early in the nineteenth century.

GEORGE COLMAN, JR.

1762-1836.

THE younger HE younger Colman,' like his father, was educated at Westminster School. He was a student of Lincoln's Inn, and occupied chambers in King's Bench Walk, Inner Temple.

He lived with his father for a time in Soho Square, and was a member of the Beefsteak Club.

He was married in St. Luke's, Chelsea (Chelsea Old Church), in 1788, and died at No. 22 Brompton Square, Knightsbridge, the numbers of which have not been changed.

He was buried by the side of his father in the vaults of Kensington Church.

WILLIAM CONGREVE.

1670-1729.

came to London in his twenty-first year,

and entered the Middle Temple, where he remained. for some time. He lived, successively, in Southampton Street, Howard Street, and Surrey Street, Strand, in houses that it is not possible to identify now, even if they still stand, which is not at all probable. Streets were not numbered until after Congreve's day. In Howard Street Mrs. Bracegirdle was his neighbor.

Spence's

Memoran

Congreve was very intimate for years with Mrs. Bracegirdle, and lived in the same street, his house very near hers, until his acquaintance with the young Duchess of Anecdotes: Marlborough. He then quitted that house. The Fourth Duchess showed me [Dr. Young] a diamond necklace dum Book, that cost seven thousand pounds, and was purchased with the money Congreve left her. How much better would it have been to have given it to poor Mrs. Bracegirdle !

1757.

It was while living in Surrey Street, in 1728, that Congreve received the memorable visit from Voltaire, in which he was so justly rebuked by the French philosopher.

Voltaire's
Letters on

Congreve spoke of his works as trifles that were beneath him, and hinted to me in our first conversation that I should visit him upon no other footing than upon that of a gentleman who led a life of plainness and simplicity. I the English answered that had he been so unfortunate as to be a mere gentleman, I should never have come to see him ; and I was very much disgusted at so unreasonable a piece of vanity.

Nation.

Congreve died in Surrey Street, and lies in the south aisle of the nave of Westminster Abbey, not far from the grave of Mrs. Oldfield.

Johnson's

Having lain in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, where a monument Lives of the is erected to his memory by Henrietta, Duchess of Poets: Con- Marlborough, to whom, for reasons either not known or not mentioned, he bequeathed a legacy of about ten thousand pounds.

greve.

One of Congreve's favorite taverns was the Half Moon, which has long since disappeared, but the site of which is believed to be marked by Half Moon Passage, No. 158 Aldersgate Street.

He was also a member of the Kit Kat Club (see ADDISON, p. 8).

ABRAHAM COWLEY.

1618-1667.

COWLE

OWLEY, the son of a grocer, was born in Fleet Street, near Chancery Lane. His father's house is known to have 'abutted on Sargeant's Inn,' but no trace of it now remains. 23 Izaak Walton must have been his near neighbor there.

He was a pupil of Westminster School (see CHURCHILL, p. 50), and went to Cambridge in 1636. In his Essays (XI., On Myself,') he says:

When I was a very young lad at school, instead of running on holidays and playing with my fellows, I was wont to steal from them and walk in the fields, either alone with a book or with some one companion, if I could find any of the same temper.

Cowley had but little experience of London; and as his biographies show, he soon grew weary of city life, and sought rural quiet and retirement, first at Battersea, then at BarnElms, and finally at Chertsey, where he died. In his later he is said to have shown a strange and marked aversion to female society, leaving a room the moment a woman entered it.

years

Chertsey.

Cowley House . . . in which Cowley spent his last days, is on the west side of Guildford Street [Chertsey], near the railway station. . . . It was a little house, with ample gardens Thorne's and pleasant meadows attached. Not of brick indeed, Hand-Book but half timber, with a fine old oak staircase and of London: balusters, and one or two wainscoted chambers, which yet [1876] remain much as when Cowley dwelt there, as do also the poet's study, a small closet with a view meadow-ward to St. Anne's Hill, and the room, overlooking the road, in which he died. He lived here little more than two years in all.

The greater part of this house was taken down, and again rebuilt in 1878.

Spence's

Cowley's allowance was at last not above three hundred a year. He died at Chertsey; and his death was occasioned by a mean accident, whilst his great friend, Dean Sprat, was with him on a visit there. They had been together Anecdotes, to see a neighbor of Cowley's, who, according to the section i., fashion of those times, made them too welcome. They did not set out for their walk home till it was too late, and had drank so deep that they lay in the fields all night.

1728-30.

This gave Cowley the fever that carried him off. still talks of the drunken Dean.

It is but just to the memory of Cowley to say that other authorities assert that the cold which ended his life was contracted while he was staying too long in the fields to give directions to his laborers.' When Charles II. heard of his death he is said to have exclaimed, 'Mr. Cowley has not left behind him a better man in England.' Few men of Mr. Cowley's guild in England are more entirely forgotten in the Victorian age.

Cowley was buried in the Abbey, 'next to Chaucer's monument,' August 3, 1667.

WILLIAM COWPER.

The parish

Went to Mr. Cowley's funeral, whose corpse lay at Wallingford House [the site of which is occupied by the Admiralty Office on Whitehall], and was thence conveyed to Westminster Abbey, in a hearse with six horses, and gust 3, 1667. all funeral decency; near a hundred coaches of noblemen and persons of quality following, among them all the wits of the town, divers bishops and clergymen.

Evelyn's
Diary, Au-

1731-1800.

COWPE

OWPER was a pupil of Westminster School from his tenth to his eighteenth year, which were probably the happiest years of his life. Among his schoolfellows were Warren Hastings, Cumberland, and Churchill.

The time of William Cowper seems now, so far as Westminster is concerned, equally remote. It was in the churchyard of St. Margaret's, while he was a scholar at Westminster, that he