d
the owner of the mansion had verbally made terms with the patriots, when
the Chancellor, outbidding them, bought the house himself. "I had no
other means," he wrote to his daughter, "of preventing the destruction
of my present house as a place in which I could live, or which anybody
else would take. The purchase-money is large, but I have already had
such offers, that I shall not, I think, lose by it."

Russell Square--where Lord Loughborough (who knows aught of the Earl of
Rosslyn?) had his town house, after leaving Lincoln's Inn Fields, and
where Charles Abbott (Lord Tenterden) established himself on leaving the
house in Queen Square, into which he married during the summer of
1795--maintained a quasi-fashionable repute much later than the older
and therefore more interesting parts of the 'old law quarter.' Theodore
Hook's disdain for Bloomsbury is not rightly appreciated by those who
fail to bear in mind that the Russell Square of Hook's time was tenanted
by people who--though they were unknown to 'fashion,' in the sense given
to the word by men of Brummel's habit and tone--had undeniable status
amongst the aristocracy and gentry of England. With some justice the
witty writer has been charged with snobbish vulgarity because he
ridiculed humble Bloomsbury for being humble. His best defence is found
in the fact that his extravagant scorn was not directed at helpless and
altogether obscure persons so much as at an educated and well-born class
who laughed at his caricatures, and gave dinners at which he was proud
to be present. Though it fails to clear the novelist of the special
charge, this apology has a certain amount of truth; and in so far as it
palliates some of his offences against good taste and gentle feeling, by
all means let him have the full benefit of it. Criticism can afford to
be charitable to the clever, worthless man, now that no one admires or
tries to respect him. Again, it may be advanced, in Hook's behalf, that
political animosity--a less despicable, though not less hurtful passion
than love of gentility--contributed to Hook's dislike of the quarter on
the north side of Holborn. As a humorist he ridiculed, as a panderer to
fashionable prejudices he sneered at, Bloomsbury; but as a tory he
cherished a genuine antagonism to the district of town that was
associated in the public mind with the wealth and ascendency of the
house of Bedford. Anyhow, the Russell Square neighborhood--although it
was no lon