GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



The awful Dr. Busby, who for fifty-five years, ruled Westminster 

 School, left behind him an unenviable reputation for severity ; 

 and many are the tales of his excessive addiction to the birch. 



I think it must have been of this famous pedagogue that the 

 story was told that when on one occasion a dozen boys appeared 

 before him, he at once concluded that they were misdemeanants 

 sent up to him for correction, and had already birched half of 

 them, before the remainder could explain that they were the 

 new confirmation class ! 



The doctor numbered among his pupils Dryden, Locke, Prior 

 and Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and was able to boast that 

 at one time, sixteen of the bishops who then occupied the bench, 

 had been punished by his " little rod." 



It is probable that these and similar stories haunting the College 

 House, and the dwelling still nearer to Walpole House in which the 

 School staff resided when at Chiswick and reaching the ears 

 of the boy Thackeray, impressed his childish imagination ; and 

 so much so, that, in after years the plot of his immortal novel- 

 demanding the introduction of a schoolmistress rather than a 

 schoolmaster he created Miss Pinkerton, ' that austere and 

 god-like woman " " that majestic woman," the friend of the great 

 lexicographer ; the correspondent of Mrs. Chapone of whom, never- 

 theless, Becky Sharp so completely got the better. 



Among the earliest tenants of Walpole House which must 

 have gone by another name in her time was one of the three 

 notorious women of whom Macaulay in his history says, that 

 " their charms were the boast, and their vices the disgrace of 

 three nations." No longer young in 1685, when Charles II. died, 

 *' Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland " better known as Lady Castle- 

 maine " still retained some traces of that superb and voluptuous 

 loveliness, which, twenty years before, overcame the hearts of 

 men." In her old age she retired to Chiswick then a pretty 

 waterside village chiefly inhabited by fisher folk, and watermen. 

 She died in 1709 and was buried in Chiswick Church, in company 

 far too good for so graceless a dame. -She had been created 

 Duchess of Cleveland in 1670, with limitations to her son Charles 

 Fitzroy, and his heirs male and his name appears among the 

 inhabitants of Chiswick in 1723 so that presumably he retained 

 Walpole House during his lifetime as a residence. 



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