124 FAMOUS RACTNa MEN. 



seat, Marble Hill, Twickenham, on the 13th of February, 1879, in 

 the 8()th year of his age : and we cannot more fitly close this brief 

 sketch of his career than in the words of the writer to whom we have 

 already refeiTed. In her Life of Samuel Richardson^ the Author of 

 " Clarissa Harloiue,^' Mrs. Barbauld tells us that one day, when 

 going to Hampstead in the stage coach, she had for her companion 

 a Frenchman, who was making an excursion to that famous suburb of 

 London for the express pm-pose of seeing the house in the Flask 

 Walk, where Clarissa FTarlowe lodged. " What a compliment to the 

 creative genius of Kichardson !" exclaimed Samuel Rogers, when the 

 story was related to him by ^Irs. Barbauld. That it is the privilege 

 of genius to 



"(Jive to airy notliiiigs 

 A local bahitalion and a name " 



has long been an accepted maxim ; but the force and realistic power 

 of imagination never received a more striking illustration than in 

 the circumstances and surroundings of Marble Hill, the house which 

 General Peel had inhabited for the last quarter of a century, and in 

 which his declining years were passed. It was once the suburban 

 villa of Mrs. Howard, afterwards the Countess of Suffolk, who was 

 long the chere amie of (reorge II. ; and in his Heart of Midlothian, 

 Sir Walter Scott represents — not without an exaggeration of poetic 

 license — that George's Queen, Caroline of Anspach, was a visitor at 

 Lady Suffolk's villa upon the occasion when the famous Duke of 

 Argyle and Greenwicli carried .Jeannie Deans into the presence of 

 her Majesty, to plead for the life of her condemned sister, Effie. 

 The ideal scene that ensued in the garden of Marble Hill has so 

 passed into the domrun of actual history, tliat the avenue of elm 

 trees extending from the house down to the bank of the adjoining 

 Thames has long bonie the name of " Jeannie Deans's Walk." It 

 has been curiously scrutinized by thousands of passengers, who have 

 scanned it from the boats which wafted them to and fro upon the 

 river, and who have forgotten that .Jeannie and Effie Deans and their 

 stiffed-necked old father are merely " the shadows of a dream." But, 

 henceforward, the avenue will be invested in the eyes of sight-seers 

 with an increased respect, when it is remembered that in the ad- 

 joining house one of the most upright and popular sportsmen and 

 owners of race- horses that his country has known brought his long 

 and distinguished career to an honourable close. 



THE EAEL OF WILTON. 



ON Monday, the 7th of March, 1882, })assed away, in his 

 eighty-second year, the last of that galaxy of sportsmen, 

 which shed a lustre over five decades of this century, and included 

 such names as those of Sir Tatton Sykes, Lord George Bentinck,. 



