of Tunbridge, which for these three or four years have been much frequented, insomuch that they who have seen both say it is not inferior to the spa for good company, numbers of people, and other appurtenances." The spring, however, would seem to have passed out of fashion, and so out of memory also.

The estate subsequently became forfeited to the Crown, but was granted by Charles II. to his brother James, Duke of York, and he transferred it to Sir Robert Brookes, who was here visited by Samuel Pepys. The genial gossiper writes in his "Diary," under date of May 14, 1665-"To church, it being Whit Sunday; my wife very fine in a new yellow bird's eye hood, as the fashion is now. I took a coach, and to Wanstead, the house where Sir H. Mildmay died, and now Sir Robert Brookes lives, having bought it of the Duke of York, it being forfeited to him: a fine seat, but an old-fashioned house, and being not full of people, looks flatly." Sir Robert Brookes, who was for some time M.P. for Aldborough, in Suffolk, held this manor from 1662 to 1667. He afterwards retired to France, and died there in bad circumstances. From a letter among the Pepys MSS., Sir Robert appears to have been drowned in the river at Lyons. As we learn from Pepys' "Diary" (April 17, 1667), there appears to have been some talk of Admiral Sir William Penn, the father of the founder of Pennsylvania, becoming the purchaser of Wanstead House. Under date of May 1, Pepys writes:"Sir W. Pen did give me an account this afternoon of his design of buying Sir Robert Brookes's fine house at Wanstead: which I so wondered at, and did give him reasons against it, which he allowed of, and told me that he did intend to pull down the house, and build a less, and that he should get £1,500 by the old house, and I know not what fooleries. But I will never believe he ever intended to buy it, for my part, though he troubled Mr. Ganden to go and look upon it, and advise him in it."

From the Mildmays, Wanstead passed by sale to Sir Josiah Child, who spent a large portion of his fortune in improving the grounds, by planting fresh trees and forming canals and a lake. Under date of March 16, 1683, John Evelyn writes in his "Diary":"I went to see Sir Josiah Child's prodigious cost in planting walnut-trees about his seate, and making fish-ponds, many miles in circuit in Epping Forest, in a barren spot, as oftentimes these suddenly. monied men for the most part seate themselves. He, from a merchant's apprentice and management of the East India Company's Stock, being ariv'd to an estate ('tis

said) of £200,000, and lately married his daughter to the eldest sonn of the Duke of Beaufort, late Marquis of Worcester, with £50,000 portional present and various expectations." And again, under the same date :-"I din'd at Mr. Houblon's, a rich and gentile French merchant, who was building a house in the Forest, neare Sir J. Child's, in a place where the late Earle of Norwich dwelt some time, and which came from his lady, the widow of Mr. Baker. It will be a pretty villa, about 5 miles from White-chapell."

Sir Josiah Child was an alderman and goldsmith of London, and the founder of Child's Bank, at Temple Bar.* He died in 1699, and was buried in the old church at Wanstead. His son and successor, Sir Richard Child, was successively created Baron Newton and Viscount Castlemaine and Earl Tylney. He pulled down the old house, and built a new mansion near its site, called Wanstead House. This building, according to the "Complete English Traveller" (1771), was regarded a century ago as "one of the most elegant houses in England, both for the building and the gardens.' In fact, it was a palace nearly equal to Canons in its palmy days, if not superior to it. The writer describes it thus in detail:-"It is constructed according to the best rules in the Corinthian order, and the front entirely of Portland stone. The portico in the centre is supported by pillars of the Corinthian order, and under it is the landing place that leads to the great hall, where there are a vast variety of ornaments and paintings by the best masters in Italy. The dining-room is on the left of the hall, being twenty-four feet square, and adjoining to it is the drawing-room, of the same size. On the right of the hall is another dining-room, twenty-five feet square, and a drawing-room thirty by twenty-five. On the chimney-piece of the drawing-room is the representation of an eagle taking up a snake, elegantly cut in white marble; and from this room is an entrance to the bed-chamber, from which is a passage into the ball-room, which is seventy-five by twenty-seven feet, and connects the whole front line of apartments.

"The spacious gardens were laid out before the house was begun, and are extremely elegant.

"Mr. Campbell, the author of 'Vitruvius Britannicus,' was the architect employed in contriving this noble house, or rather, palace; and although in particular parts it has beauties exceeding many of the best houses in the kingdom, yet when all the parts are taken together, it seems to want some of that proportion necessary to set off the whole."

* See "Old and New London," Vol. I., p. 36.

The author adds that the present lord has resided many years in Italy, without any prospect of returning to England, and much regrets the fact that so magnificent a palace should be uninhabited, and left to the care of a handful of servants. As Lord Tylney had no heirs, he augurs that ere long the estate will pass into the hands of some other family, who will prefer English freedom to Italian slavery. He was not far out in his guess; for a few years afterwards Wanstead passed to Sir James Long, who took the name of Tylney.

I have said that Wanstead House was a palace; and in order to justify my words, I add some details of the building. The principal front of the house was 260 feet in length, and in the tympanum of the grand portico in the centre were the arms of the Tylney family, finely sculptured. The building itself consisted of two storeys, the uppermost containing the ball-room, state bed-chambers, and other principal apartments. The great hall was lavishly decorated. The ceiling, by Kent, was gilt, and enriched with paintings of Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night. The walls were ornamented with paintings from Roman history, by Cassali, representing Coriolanus and his mother Porsenna, and Pompey's last interview with his family. Here also were two large statues, brought from the ruins of Herculaneum-one of Domitian, and the other of Livia, the wife of Agrippa. The ball-room was magnificently fitted up, according to the taste of the last century, the furniture being richly embossed and gilt, and the walls hung with tapestry. The latter represented the story of Telemachus and the battles of Alexander. Over the chimney was a fine painting of Portia, the wife of Brutus, by Schalken. In the saloon were several statues, and also a picture of Pandora, by Nollekens, the father of the sculptor of that name. The remaining rooms contained a large number of paintings by the best masters, including Guido, Titian, and Lely.

Lord Tylney, though he lived so much abroad, appears to have been very proud of his new mansion; at all events, Horace Walpole writes thus of him and the place in a letter to Richard Bentley, dated 17th July, 1755" I dined yesterday at Wanstead; many years have passed since I saw it. The disposition of the house and prospect are better than I expected, and very fine. The garden-which, they tell you, cost as much as the house, that is, £100,000-is wretched; the furniture fine, but without taste. The present earl is the most generous creature in the world; in the first chamber I entered he offered me four marble tables that lay in cases about the room. I compounded, after forty refusals of everything

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I commended, to bring away only a haunch of venison. I believe he has not had so cheap a visit a good while. I commend myself as I ought; for, to be sure, there were twenty ebony chairs, and a couch, and a table, and a glass, that would have tried the virtue of a philosopher of double my size."

On the death of the earl, without issue, in 1784, this manor, with other large estates, devolved upon his nephew, Sir James Tylney-Long, Bart., of Draycot, Wiltshire, whose only son, James, a minor, succeeded to the baronetcy and estates in the year 1794. He died shortly after, when Wanstead became the property of his sister, Miss TylneyLong, also a minor, who thus became one of the richest heiresses in England. During her minority Wanstead House was taken as the residence of the Prince de Condé. Louis XVIII. and other members of the exiled Bourbon family also occasionally lived here during that time.

There were many suitors for the hand of the young heiress, and the prize was eventually won by the Hon. William Pole-Wellesley, elder son of Lord Maryborough, afterwards Earl of Mornington. They were married amid great ceremony at St. James's Church, Piccadilly, on the 14th of March, 1812, when he assumed the additional names of Tylney and Long. The following details of the dresses worn by the bride and bridegroom, and other particulars of the wedding, culled from the newspapers of the time, may interest some of our readers. The dress of the bride, we are told, consisted of a robe of real Brussels point lace, placed over white satin; the bonnet was made of Brussels lace, ornamented with two ostrich feathers; she likewise wore a deep lace veil and a white satin pelisse trimmed with swansdown. The dress cost 700 guineas, the bonnet 150, and the veil 200. Mr. Pole-Wellesley wore a plain blue coat with yellow buttons, a white waistcoat, buff breeches, and white. silk stockings. The lady's jewels consisted princi pally of a brilliant necklace and earrings; the former cost 25,000 guineas. Every domestic in the family of Lady Catherine Long, the bride's mother, was liberally provided for. The fortune remaining to Mrs. Tylney-Long-Pole-Wellesley, after allowing for considerable sums given as an additional portion to each of the Miss Longs, and an annuity to Lady Catherine, was £80,000 per annum.

At the time of the marriage Mr. Wellesley is said to have been deeply in debt, and matters seemed to have gone from bad to worse afterwards, for in the course of a few years, by reckless expenditure, he contrived to get through the whole of his recently acquired fortune, and had so encumbered the

estates, that in June, 1822, the whole of the contents of Wanstead House were swept away under the hammer of the celebrated auctioneer, George Robbins, of King Street, Covent Garden. The sale produced as much excitement as the dispersal of the contents of Strawberry Hill by the same auctioneer, just twenty years later; it lasted thirtytwo days, and realised the sum of £41,000. No purchaser could be found for the house as it stood, so it was accordingly taken down, the materials being sold in separate lots. Among the objects of antiquarian interest disposed of were the celebrated ebony chairs and sofa, once the boasted gems of Queen Elizabeth, and which are so particularly mentioned by Horace Walpole in one of his letters for their singular beauty and antique character. After experiencing various transfers and vicissitudes. of fortune, these articles came into the possession of Lord Tylney. They were purchased at the sale here by Graham, of Waterloo Place, by whom they were afterwards sold to Lord Macdonald.

At the sale of the contents of the mansion the family portraits were reserved; but even these subsequently shared a similar fate, for they, too, were sold in 1851, at the auction-rooms of Messrs. Christie and Manson, "in consequence of the nonpayment of expenses for warehousing-room." Their dispersion was the last event in the history of Wanstead House, which once had vied with Canons in its glories, and now came to share the same fate. On the death. of his uncle, in 1842, and the consequent accession of his father to the earldom of Mornington, Mr. Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley became Viscount Wellesley; and three years later, on the death of his father, he succeeded to the title of Earl of Mornington, and became head of the noble house of Wellesley. His marriage with the rich heiress of Wanstead turned out to be altogether an ill-assorted union. He not only treated her shamefully, but spent all her princely fortune, and she died, it is said, of a broken heart three years after the sale of her goods and the destruction of her house.

Mr. Wellesley, notwithstanding all his reverses, did not long remain a widower; for, perhaps with the view of retrieving his shattered fortunes, in 1828 he married, as his second wife, a daughter of Colonel Thomas Paterson. The death of this lady in 1869 was thus commented on in the Athenæum at the time :-"The Countess of Mornington, widow of the notorious William PoleTylney-Long-Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, who died recently, in her seventy-sixth year, adds an incident to the romance of the Peerage. After the ruin into which the reckless earl's affairs fell, some

forty years ago, this lady was for a brief time an inmate of St. George's Workhouse, and more than once had to apply at police-courts for temporary relief. Yet she might have called monarchs her cousins. She was descended from the grandest and greatest of all the Plantagenets. Her mother (wife of Colonel Paterson), Ann Porterfield of that ilk, came, through the houses of Boyd, Cunningham, Glencairn, and Hamilton, from Mary Stuart, daughter of King James II. of Scotland, and seventh in descent from Edward I. of England. The earldom of Mornington, extinct in the elder line of the Wellesleys, has lapsed to the Duke of Wellington." The manor of Wanstead, with some adjacent lands, became the property of another Wellesley, Lord Cowley.

"In the latter part of the eighteenth century," writes the author of "Provincial Excursions" in 1843, "Wanstead House still displayed all the splendour which the Childs, the Tylneys, and the Longs, had lavished upon a palace fit for the abode of gentle and royal blood. Little did I dream that in one quarter of a century I should see its proud columns prostrate in the dust, its decorations an nihilated, its pictures and sculptures dispersed by the magic of the hammer; at one period simply a deserted mansion, at another a refuge for exiled princes; then for a brief space polluted by riot and profligacy; and ultimately its lawns and gardens swept away, its stately groves and avenues remorselessly destroyed, and myself present at the sad catastrophe. Such, however, were its short and painful annals; and, except the grotto, not one stone now remains upon another. The palace, destined to stand for ages, and on which time had made no inroads, was removed, with the approbation of the Lord Chancellor, when little more than a hundred winters had passed over it: when its features were just mellowed, its woods and plantations in full luxuriance, and all around it smiling in perfection. Wanstead House was the most attractive object (of its kind) near London, and a national ornament." And the writer goes on to lament that the Government did not purchase it for some national institution, scientific or educational, adding his belief that it would not have been allowed to perish if its walls had been covered with ivy, and the fabric been in the last stage of decay. "I was familiar," he adds, "with every little bower and secluded avenue; I knew where its blossoms were fairest and the fruits choicest; could thread the mazes of its delightful foliage and exotic gardens, its limpid waters, and its verdant lawns, all which I have visited at dawn and at sunset, in midday and at night."