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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