immediately fronts Anne Street, and is now a large
establishment for the sale of lamps. It was a handsome old house, and at
one time belonged to the "wicked" Lord Lyttleton. At the time I speak
of, we occupied only a part of it, the rest remaining in the possession
of the proprietor, who was a picture-dealer, and his collection of dusky
_chefs-d'oeuvre_ covered the walls of the passages and staircases with
dark canvas, over whose varnished surface ill-defined figures and
ill-discerned faces seemed to flit, as with some trepidation I ran past
them. The house must have been a curious as well as a very large one;
but I never saw more of it than our own apartments, which had some
peculiarities that I remember. Our dining-room was a very large, lofty,
ground-floor room, fitted up partially as a library with my father's
books, and having at the farther end, opposite the windows, two heavy,
fluted pillars, which gave it rather a dignified appearance. My mother's
drawing-room, which was on the first floor and at the back of the house,
was oval in shape and lighted only by a skylight; and one entrance to it
was through a small anteroom or boudoir, with looking-glass doors and
ceiling all incrusted with scrolls and foliage and _rococo_ Louis Quinze
style of ornamentation, either in plaster or carved in wood and painted
white. There were back staircases and back doors without number, leading
in all directions to unknown regions; and the whole house, with its
remains of magnificence and curious lumber of objects of art and
_vertu_, was a very appropriate frame for the traditional ill-repute of
its former noble owner.

A ludicrous circumstance enough, I remember, occurred, which produced no
little uproar and amusement in one of its dreariest chambers. My brother
John was at this time eagerly pursuing the study of chemistry for his
own amusement, and had had an out-of-the-way sort of spare bedroom
abandoned to him for his various ill savored materials and scientific
processes, from which my mother suffered a chronic terror of sudden
death by blowing up. There was a monkey in the house, belonging to our
landlord, and generally kept confined in his part of it, whence the
knowledge of his existence only reached us through anecdotes brought by
the servants. One day, however, an alarm was spread that the monkey had
escaped from his own legitimate quarters and was running wild over the
house. Chase was given, and every hole and corner sear