riend; Kneller painted
him. He was probably the greatest Hamlet that ever appeared; and Cibber
sums up all eulogy of him when he says, "I never heard a line in tragedy
come from Betterton wherein my judgment, my ear, and my imagination were
not fully satisfied, which since his time I cannot equally say of any
one actor whatsoever." The enchantment of his voice was such, adds the
same excellent dramatic critic, that the multitude no more cared for
sense in the words he spoke, "than our musical connoiseurs think it
essential in the celebrated airs of an Italian opera."

Even when Whitefriars was at its grandest, and plumes moved about its
narrow river-side streets, Dorset House was its central and most stately
mansion. It was originally a mansion with gardens, belonging to a Bishop
of Winchester; but about the year 1217 (Henry III.) a lease was granted
by William, Abbot of Westminster, to Richard, Bishop of Sarum, at the
yearly rent of twenty shillings, the Abbot retaining the advowson of St.
Bride's Church, and promising to impart to the said bishop any needful
ecclesiastical advice. It afterwards fell into the hands of the
Sackvilles, held at first by a long lease from the see, but was
eventually alienated by the good Bishop Jewel. A grant in 1611 (James
I.) confirmed the manor of Salisbury Court to Richard, Earl of Dorset.

[Illustration: BAYNARD'S CASTLE, FROM A VIEW PUBLISHED IN 1790 (_see
page 200_).]

The Earl of Dorset, to whom Bishop Jewel alienated the Whitefriars
House, was the father of the poet, Thomas Sackville, Lord High Treasurer
to Queen Elizabeth. The bishop received in exchange for the famous old
house a piece of land near Cricklade, in Wiltshire. The poet earl was
that wise old statesman who began "The Mirror for Magistrates," an
allegorical poem of gloomy power, in which the poet intended to make all
the great statesmen of England since the Conquest pass one by one to
tell their troublous stories. He, however, only lived to write one
legend--that of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. One of his finest
and most Holbeinesque passages relates to old age:--

"And next in order sad, Old Age we found;
His beard all hoar, his eyes hollow and blind;
With drooping cheer still poring on the ground,
As on the place where Nature him assigned
To rest, when that the sisters had untwined
His vital thread, and ended with their knife
The fleeting course of fast declining life.
Cr