The Night Side of London by James Ewing Ritchie

One of the peculiar institutions of the country is the square. Charles Knight says: -- "The Piazza, Place, Platz, of Italy, France, or Germany, have little in common with it. Its elements are simple enough -- an open space of a square figure, houses on each of the four sides, and an enclosed centre with turf, a few trees, and, it may be, flowers; and there is a square. " There are fashionable squares, all alive with the sound of carriage-wheels and the chaste accents of a thousand flunkeys; there are city squares, dull, dark places, with old red-brick houses, and a stunted, smoke-dried shrub or two in the middle. Then there are respectable squares, which never were fashionable, nor ever aimed to be such; and then there are squares which were once fashionable, but now are sadly gone out of repute. One of the chief of these is Leicester-square. Do our readers remember how Queen Caroline found time to be the mother of seven promising children, of whom the eldest, Frederick, Prince of Wales, was a continual source of sorrow and vexation to both his parents? "He resembled," writes Horace Walpole, with his usual sneer, "the Black Prince only in dying before his father. " Well, there was a house built before the Commonwealth, called Leicester-house. Hither came this young, dissipated, short-lived Prince, and fixed his court. When he passed away, and the wits wrote --

"Here lies Fred, / Who was alive, / And is dead,"