414 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
very needlessly taken down in Plymouth, and a great many more 
have been barbarously hacked and mutilated; in fact, Plymouth is 
fast becoming a treeless town. The old trees have been removed, 
and few young trees are being planted. 
The buildings too, with the indubitable marks of periods which 
have made Plymouth famous in history, are being rapidly swept 
away; and in a few years we shall look in vain for a single 
domestic building which could have been familiar to Sir Francis 
Drake when beating the borough bounds, to speak of no earlier 
time. 
Since I read a paper before this Society, some fifteen years ago, 
on ‘‘ The Ancient Buildings of Plymouth,” we have lost Hoe-gate, 
the thirteenth century remains of the White Friars, the Turk’s Head 
(a medizval hostelry), the Hospital of the Poor’s Portion, the Old 
Grammar School, the almshouses in Green Street, an Elizabethan 
house in Notte Street (not the fine house of that period), and a lot 
of other buildings more or less intimately connected with the past 
history of the town. - The next important old structure to go will 
probably be Palace Court, of which an excellent wood-cut has 
appeared this year (1878) in the Graphic. Although at present it 
is anything but a decent habitation for Christians, yet we believe 
this to be the house mentioned by Leland as ‘‘the goodly house 
towards the haven, where Catherine of Arragon stayed whilst here,’ 
and where she was entertained by John Painter, then late mayor. 
Recently a window has been placed in the New Guildhall, re- 
presenting the reception by Painter at this Palace Court of the 
princess and her retinue. The doomed building is admirable from 
an artistic point of view, being the most picturesque of the few 
old structures left in Plymouth. 
A very old and curious street—the oldest, I almost think, in the 
town, though it is called New Street—has lost many of its pecu- 
liarities since I wrote last on this subject; and there are, I think, 
only one or two small houses left with the very ancient arrange- 
ment of cellar and solar, the latter approached, not by an internal 
staircase, but by stone steps owtsede the building. Rarely, except 
in the earliest existing examples of English domestic architecture, 
do we find this picturesque arrangement. 
Some of our streets have lost their-old historic names; Briton 
Side has merged into Exeter Street, and (more recently still) 
White Cross Street into North Street. The Society will agree 
