JOHN WILSON CROKER, AN OLD-TIME REVIEWER... JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART, A " QUARTERLY" REVIEWER.. M735600 66 213 216 221 227 CHATS ON WRITERS AND BOOKS. HOLLAND HOUSE. THERE are many famous houses in England well known to the readers of history and to the lovers of literature. There are Marlborough House, Devonshire House, Chesterfield House, Lansdowne House, Strawberry Hill and Cambridge House, whose history and associations go back at least to the times of Elizabeth and of James, but none of them calls up so many striking scenes, incidents and brilliant notabilities as Holland House, and none of them is so deeply impressed upon our literature. Celebrated as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was in the first half of the nineteenth century that it reached its greatest fame and became known the world over. In its earlier period it had witnessed the conferences of Cromwell and Ireton; in its library Addison had studied and written, and in one of its stately chambers he died serenely in his Christian faith. In 1749 it passed into the possession of Henry Fox, who became the first Baron Holland, and here the infancy and youth of Charles James Fox were passed, and later it descended to Henry Richard, the third Baron Holland, who took possession of it in 1796. The next year he married the divorced wife of Sir Godfrey Webster, he himself being the co-respondent in the case. It is to them that Holland House owes its greatest fame. Lady Holland was the daughter and heiress of a rich West Indian planter named Richard Vassall, and was born in Jamaica in 1770. It has been said there was a trace of African blood in her veins. She was a woman of rare beauty, and Macaulay, who did not know her until she was past sixty, wrote to his sister that she was "a large, bold-looking woman, with the remains of a fine person and the air of Queen Elizabeth." In another place he says "she must have been a most beautiful woman." Like Lady Blessington, she was not received in English society, although a few high dames, such as the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Lansdowne, occasionally visited her, but at her |