ger fashionable, as Belgravia and Mayfair are fashionable at
the present day--remained the locality of many important families, at
the time when Mr. Theodore Hook was pleased to assume that no one above
the condition of a rich tradesman or second-rate attorney lived in it.
Of the lawyers whose names are mournfully associated with the square
itself are Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd. In 1818, the
year of his destruction by his own hand, Sir Samuel Romilly lived there;
and Talfourd had a house on the east side of the square up to the time
of his lamented death in 1854.

That Theodore Hook's ridicule of Bloomsbury greatly lessened for a time
the value of its houses there is abundant evidence. When he deluged the
district with scornful satire, his voice was a social power, to which a
considerable number of honest people paid servile respect. His clever
words were repeated; and Bloomsbury having become a popular by-word for
contempt, aristocratic families ceased to live, and were reluctant to
invest money, in its well-built mansions. But Hook only accelerated a
movement which had for years been steadily though silently making
progress. Erskine knew Red Lion Square when every house was occupied by
a lawyer of wealth and eminence, if not of titular rank; but before he
quitted the stage, barristers had relinquished the ground in favor of
opulent shopkeepers. When an ironmonger became the occupant of a house
in Red Lion Square on the removal of a distinguished counsel, Erskine
wrote the epigram--

"This house, where once a lawyer dwelt,
Is now a smith's,--alas!
How rapidly the iron age
Succeeds the age of brass."

These lines point to a minor change in the social arrangements of
London, which began with the century, and was still in progress when
Erskine had for years been mouldering in his grave. In 1823, the year of
Erskine's death, Chief Baron Richards expired in his town house, in
Great Ormond Street. In the July of the following year Baron
Wood--_i.e._, George Wood, the famous special pleader--died at his house
in Bedford Square, about seventeen months after his resignation of his
seat in the Court of Exchequer to John Hullock.

At the present time the legal fraternity has deserted Bloomsbury. The
last of the Judges to depart was Chief Baron Pollock, who sold his great
house in Queen Square at a quite recent date. With the disappearance of
this venerable and universally respected judge,