f so honored a
term to the dwelling of an actress of lost repute; but surely that may
be a "shrine" where consideration can be taught--where mercy is to be
learned--and--that which is "greater" than even faith and hope--charity!

However agreeable may be the present, and we have no reason to complain
of it in any way, there is inexhaustible delight in reverting to the
past. We do not mean living over again our own days; for though, if we
could "pick and choose," there are sundry portions of our lives we might
desire to repeat, yet, beginning from the beginning, taking the bad and
the good "straight on," there can be few, men or women, who would
willingly pass again through the whole of a gone-by career. And this,
properly considered, is one of our greatest blessings; stifling much of
vain regret, and teaching us to "look forward" to the future. We have
always had, if we may so call it, a domestic rambling propensity; a
desire to see "dwellings," not so much for their pictorial as their, so
to say, personal celebrity: and sometimes, as on our visit to Barley
Wood, this longing comes upon us at the wrong season, when a cheerful
fire at "home" would be a meet companion. It is now six years ago--six
years, last month--that, pacing along Pall Mall, we paused, and turned
to the left hand corner of St. James's Square, full of painful and
un-English memories of the Asiatic court of the second Charles; the
sovereign who had endured adversity without discovering that "sweet are
its uses;" who had "suffered tribulation" without "learning mercy"--the
king who makes us doubt if, as a people, we have any claim to what is
called "national character"--for the change that came over England,
within a few brief years, from gloomy fanaticism to reckless license, is
one of the marvels that give to history the aspect of romance. We had
been walking round Whitehall,[B] recalling the change that had swept
away nearly all relics of the past in that quarter, and strolled so far
out of our home-ward path to look at the house in Pall Mall (recently
removed from its place) which tradition says was the dwelling of Nell
Gwynne, besides her apartment at Whitehall, to which she was entitled by
virtue of her office as lady of the bed-chamber to a most outraged
queen. One of our friends remembers supping in the back room on the
ground-floor of that very house, the said room being called "the Mirror
Chamber," because the walls were panelled with looking-gl