national funeral.

St. Catherine's Hermitage, Charing Cross, stood somewhere near Charing Cross. It is believed to have been about the position of the post-office. It belonged to the See of Llandaff, and was occasionally used as a lodging by such Bishops of that See as came to attend the Court and had no town-house.

St. Mary Rounceval, on the site of Northumberland House, was founded by William Marischal, Earl of Pembroke, in Henry III.'s reign. The Earl gave several tenements to the Prior of Rounceval, in Navarre, who established here the chief house of the priory in England. The hospital was finally suppressed by Edward VI. The little village of Charing then stood between London and Westminster. It formed part of the great demesne belonging to the Abbey of Westminster, and was inhabited chiefly by Thames fishermen, who had a settlement on the bank, and by the farmers of the Westminster estates. The derivation of the name from La Chère Reine is purely fanciful.

There is certainly no part of London which has been so much changed as Charing Cross. In other parts the houses are changed, but the streets remain. Here the whole disposition of the streets has been transformed. The secondary part of the name recalls the beautiful cross, the last of the nine which marked the places where Queen Eleanor's coffin rested on its journey from Lincolnshire to Westminster Abbey. The cross was destroyed by the fanatical zeal of the Reformers. The equestrian statue of Charles I., cast in 1633 by Le Sœur, occupies the site of the cross. It had not been set up when the Civil War broke out, and was sold by the Parliament to John Rivit, a brazier, who lived by the Holborn Conduit, on condition that it should be broken up. John Rivit, however, buried the statue, and dug it up again after the Restoration. It was not until 1674 that it was actually erected, on a new pedestal made by Grinling Gibbons, in the place which it now occupies, which is the site of the old cross, the place where the regicides were executed, and where the Charing Cross pillory stood. It is curious to remark on the preservation of the site of the cross. It was apparently railed in; some of the stones of which it was made were used in paving Whitehall. Ballads were written on its destruction:

Cunningham.

Many of the regicides were executed at this spot in Charles II.'s reign, within sight of the place where they had murdered their King. These men, according to the brutal temper of the times, were cut down when half hanged and disembowelled before a great concourse of people. Pepys mentions going to the executions as to a show. Later the pillory stood here in which, among others, Titus Oates suffered. But, besides these dismal reminiscences, Charing Cross was at one time famed for its taverns and festive places of amusement, and was the resort of wits and literati in the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson speaks of the "full tide of human existence" being at Charing Cross, and if he could see it now he might be confirmed in his opinion.

At the top of the present Northumberland Avenue stood formerly Northumberland House, the last of the Strand palaces to be destroyed, and until its destruction the chief glory and ornament of the street and Charing Cross. It was never an episcopal palace, having been built in 1605 by the Earl of Northampton; from him it went to the Earl of Suffolk, and was called for a time Suffolk House; in 1642 it fell into the hands of the Earl of Northumberland, and by marriage into those of the Duke of Somerset until 1749, when the daughter of the Duke of Somerset succeeded, and by her marriage with Sir Hugh Smithson the house became the property of this family, now Dukes of Northumberland, until its compulsory sale in the year 1874. The house originally consisted of three sides of a quadrangle, the fourth side lying open with gardens stretching down to the river. The front was wrongly attributed to Inigo Jones. The house had been repaired or rebuilt in many places, so that there was not much that was ancient left in its later days. By the side of Northumberland House formerly ran Hartshorn Lane, now entirely obliterated. Ben Jonson was born here, and lived here in his childhood.

Trafalgar Square was built over the site of what was formerly the Royal Mews, a building of very ancient foundation; and a rookery of obscure and ill-famed lanes and alleys on the west and north of St. Martin's Church, popularly known as the Bermudas, and afterwards the Caribbean Islands. In the midst of the mews stood a small and remarkable building called Queen Elizabeth's Bath. It is almost impossible to estimate the difference between the then and the now, in regard to this particular part. St. Martin's Lane continued right up to Northumberland House, where the lion of the proud Percies stiffened his tail on the parapet. The house stood across the present head of Northumberland Avenue. The Royal Mews themselves were where the fountains now splash, and on the further side of them was Hedge Lane.

Pennant says the Mews was so called from having been used for the King's falcons—at least, from the time of Richard III. to Henry VIII. In the latter King's reign the royal horses were stabled here, but the name Mews was retained, and has come to be applied to any town range of stabling. The mews were removed to make way for the National Gallery about 1834. Geoffrey Chaucer, the poet, was Clerk of the King's Works, and of the Mews at Charing about the end of Richard II.'s reign. During the Commonwealth Colonel Joyce was imprisoned in the Mews by order of Oliver Cromwell.

It is supposed that we are indebted to William IV. for the idea of a square to be called Trafalgar in honour of Nelson, and to contain some worthy memorial of the hero. The total height of the monument, designed by Railton, is 193 feet, and its design is from that of one of the columns of the Temple of Mars at Rome. The statue, which looks so small from the ground, is really 17 feet high, nearly three times the height of a man; it was the work of E. H. Baily, R.A. The pedestal has bronze bas-reliefs on its four sides, representing the four greatest of Nelson's battles, Trafalgar, St. Vincent, Aboukir, and Copenhagen. The massive lions on the extended pedestal were designed by Sir Edwin Landseer.

Of the other statues, that of George IV. is by Sir Francis Chantrey, and was originally intended for the top of the Marble Arch, and that of General Gordon was designed by Hamo Thorneycroft. Bronze blocks let into the north wall of the square contain the measures of the secondary standards of length, and were inserted here in 1876 by the Standards Department of the Board of Trade. The Union Club and College of Physicians are on the west side of the square. The latter was founded by Dr. Linacre, physician to King Henry VIII.

The National Gallery was not designed as it now stands, but grew gradually. The idea of a collection of national pictures began in 1824, when the Angerstein Collection of thirty-eight pictures was purchased. The building began in 1832, and was opened six years later, but there were then only six