St. James's Place

St. James's Pl. is in St. James's-street, Westminster, and is the third turning on the right hand going from Piccadilly, and about nineteen houses on the left hand from Pall-Mall.

St. James's Place, St. James's Street,—at 66, the third on the R. from 162, Piccadilly, and about nineteen doors on the L. from the Palace.

James's (St.) Place, St. James's Street, built circ. 1694.¹ The best houses look into The Green Park. Eminent Inhabitants.—Addison. He was living here in 1710.²

Addison's chief companions before he married Lady Warwick (in 1716) were Steele, Budgell, Philips, Carey, Davenant, and Colonel Brett. He used to breakfast with one or other of them at his lodgings in St. James's Place, dine at taverns with them, then to Button's.—Pope in Spence, ed. Singer, p. 196.

Parnell—

I have not yet seen the dear Archdeacon, who is at his old lodgings in St James's Place.—Jervase to Pope.

Admiral Churchill, brother of the great Duke of Marlborough (d. 1710). Mr. Secretary Craggs.³ William Cleland, the friend of Pope.

Come as far up St. James's Place as you can, still keeping on the right side, turn up at the end which lands you at a little court, of which the middle door is that of my house.—Cleland to Dr. Birch, November 16, 1739.

White Kennett, Bishop of Peterborough, author of Kennett's Register, etc., died here December 19, 1728. Molly Lepel (Lady Hervey), in a house with five windows in a row fronting the Green Park, built for her in 1747, from the designs of Henry Flitcroft, architect of the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, afterwards occupied by the Earl of Moira (Marquis of Hastings), and subsequently divided into two. She alludes to it in her Letters, p. 170.⁴ Sir John Cope was her next door neighbour in 1750. Lord Carlisle was living in Lady Hervey's house in 1775, when obliged to give up Carlisle House on account of his debts. Earl Spencer, in Spencer House, looking on the Green Park; a noble edifice of Italian architecture designed by John Vardy, architect. The front, in St. James's Place, and parts of the interior, were designed, 1760, by James (Athenian) Stuart.

September 27, 1756.—Tuesday morning Dr. Delany and I walked through the Park to see Mr. Spencer's house, which is begun and the ground-floor finished. One front is in St. James's Place, on the left hand as you go up the street, and another front to the Green Park; it will be superb when finished.—Mrs. Delany, vol. iii. p. 145.

John Wilkes writes, September 11, 1756: "Direct to me at Mrs. Murray's in St. James's Place, where I am in very elegant lodgings." On November 7, 1783, Charles James Fox writes from St James's Place. The Right Hon. Richard Rigby was living here in 1756. Lord Cochrane (Earl of Dundonald), the famous seaman, was living in No. 34 when M.P. for Westminster. It was to this house that the swindler De Berenger came on February 21, 1814, and obtained the disguise by which he hoped to elude the agents of the Stock Exchange. This seems to have been the principal circumstance which connected Lord Cochrane with his proceedings. Mrs. Robinson, the actress, at No. 13. Warren Hastings, as we learn from the Rolliad.

Or in thy chosen Place, St. James,
Be carolled loud amid th' applauding Imhoffs.
(Probationary Odes, No. xxi., about 1785.)

And in a note—"He did not know Mr. Hastings' house to be in St. James's Place; he did not know Mrs. Hastings to have two sons by Mynheer Imhoff, her former husband still living; and, what is more shameful than all, in a critical assessor, he had never heard of the poetical figure by which I elegantly say, the Place, St. James, instead of St. James's Place." Mrs. Delany died "at her house in St. James's Place, April 15, 1788, aged eighty-eight." Sir Francis Burdett lived for many years at No. 25, and died there, January 23, 1844. The house had been built for Lord Guildford. Samuel Rogers, author of The Pleasures of Memory, in No. 22, from the year 1803 till his death in it at the age of ninety-five on December 18, 1855. The house, the books, the pictures, the breakfasts, dinners, the talk of the host, and the famous company—fit though few—sure to be assembled there, were the delight of three generations. The house was designed by James Wyatt, R.A., the cornices and chimney-pieces were by John Flaxman.

If you enter his [Rogers's] house—his drawing-room, his library—you of yourself say, this is not the dwelling of a common mind. There is not a gem, a coin, a book thrown aside on his chimney-piece, his sofa, his table, that does not bespeak an almost fastidious elegance in the possessor.—Lord Byron's Journal.

May 1, 1805.—His [Rogers's] house in St. James's Place, looking into the Park, is deliciously situated, and furnished with great taste. He is a good poet, has a refined taste in all the arts; has a select library of the best editions of the best authors in most languages; has very fine pictures, very fine drawings; and the finest collection I ever saw of the best Etruscan vases; and moreover he gives the best dinners to the best company of men of talents and genius of any man I know: the best served and with the best liqueurs, etc.—Dr. Burney, Memoirs, vol iii. p. 337.

Madame D'Arblay had previously stated (p. 325) in the strange language which she wrote in her old age, that her father loved Rogers "for the coincident elegance and philanthropy of his disposition with his writings." Rogers's house was always open to his friends. Moore was here in December 1821 in a semi-hiding state; and there is a pleasant letter of invitation to him of five and twenty years' later date.

June 24, 1847.—My dear Moore. There is a small house in a dark and narrow corner of London (Memory Hall, as it was once called by a reckless wight who has played many a freak there, and who now sleeps in Harrow Churchyard), where you will be most welcome. So pray come and make it your home, and stay there as long as you can.—Moore's Life, vol. viii. p. 27.

Of the charm of the breakfasts and dinners, and the perfect taste displayed in various collections of works of art with which the house was filled all visitors were agreed. Leslie the painter said that it was the only house of a contemporary collector of works of art that he had ever visited in which there was not "something that betrayed a want of taste,"¹ and Bunsen was almost equally emphatic.

July 23, 1839.—I had a delightful dinner party at Rogers's yesterday; all quite in the style of a rich Roman of the time of Augustus—original drawings of Raphael, etc., after dinner, vases before. The beautiful Titians, etc, of the dining-room ingeniously lighted so that the table alone was in shade.—Bunsen's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 542.

For more than half a century a small house in a quiet nook of London has been the recognised abode of taste, and the envied resort of wit, beauty, learning, and genius. There, surrounded by the choicest treasures of art, and in a light reflected from Guidos and Titians, have sat and mingled in familiar converse the most eminent poets, painters, actors, artists, critics, travellers, historians, warriors, orators, and statesmen of two generations. Under this roof celebrities of all sorts, matured or budding, and however contrasted in genius or pursuit, met as on the table-land where (according to D'Alembert) Archimedes and Homer may stand on a perfect footing of equality. ... It was in that dining-room that Erskine told the story of his first brief, and Grattan that of his last duel; that the Iron Duke described Waterloo as a battle of giants; that Chantrey, placing his hand on a mahogany pedestal, said, "Mr. Rogers, do you remember a workman at five shillings a day who came in that door to receive your orders for his work? I was that workman." It was there too that Byron's intimacy with Moore commenced over that famous mess of potatoes and vinegar; that Madame de Stael, after a triumphant argument with Mackintosh, was (as recorded by Byron) "well ironed" by Sheridan; that Sydney Smith at dinner with Walter Scott, Campbell, Moore, Wordsworth and Washington Irving, declared that he and Irving, if the only prose writers, were not the only prosers in the company.—Hayward, Selected Essays, vol. i. p. 74.

---

¹ Rate-books of St. Martin's.
² Berkeley's Literary Relics, p. 384.
³ See Pope's verses to Mr. C.—"Few words are best; I wish 3rou well."
⁴ See also pp. 111, 125, and 159; and Walpole, Letters, vol. vi. p. 82; and vol. vii. p. 296.

¹ Autobiographical Recollections of C.R. Leslie, R.A., vol. i. p. 234.