Lincoln's Inn Fields, the Piazza of Covent Garden, Southampton
Square, which is now called Bloomsbury Square, and King's Square in Soho
Fields, which is now called Soho Square, were among the favourite spots.
Foreign princes were carried to see Bloomsbury Square, as one of the
wonders of England. [113] Soho Square, which had just been built, was to
our ancestors a subject of pride with which their posterity will hardly
sympathise. Monmouth Square had been the name while the fortunes of
the Duke of Monmouth flourished; and on the southern side towered his
mansion. The front, though ungraceful, was lofty and richly adorned.
The walls of the principal apartments were finely sculptured with fruit,
foliage, and armorial bearings, and were hung with embroidered satin.
[114] Every trace of this magnificence has long disappeared; and no
aristocratical mansion is to be found in that once aristocratical
quarter. A little way north from Holborn, and on the verge of the
pastures and corn-fields, rose two celebrated palaces, each with
an ample garden. One of them, then called Southampton House, and
subsequently Bedford House, was removed about fifty years ago to make
room for a new city, which now covers with its squares, streets, and
churches, a vast area, renowned in the seventeenth century for peaches
and snipes. The other, Montague House, celebrated for its frescoes and
furniture, was, a few months after the death of Charles the Second,
burned to the ground, and was speedily succeeded by a more magnificent
Montague House, which, having been long the repository of such various
and precious treasures of art, science, and learning as were scarcely
ever before assembled under a single roof, has now given place to an
edifice more magnificent still. [115]

Nearer to the Court, on a space called St. James's Fields, had just
been built St. James's Square and Jermyn Street. St. James's Church had
recently been opened for the accommodation of the inhabitants of this
new quarter. [116] Golden Square, which was in the next generation
inhabited by lords and ministers of state, had not yet been begun.
Indeed the only dwellings to be seen on the north of Piccadilly were
three or four isolated and almost rural mansions, of which the most
celebrated was the costly pile erected by CIarendon, and nicknamed
Dunkirk House. It had been purchased after its founder's downfall by
the Duke of Albemarle. The Clarendon Hotel and Albemarle Street still
pres