Sir Walter Stirling, who was born in 1802 and died in 1888, was a little old gentleman of ubiquitous activity, running about London with a yellow wig, short trousers, and a cotton umbrella.  I well remember his saying to me, when Mr. Bradlaugh was committed to the Clock Tower, “I don’t like this.  I am afraid it will mean mischief.  I am old enough to remember seeing Sir Francis Burdett taken to the Tower by the Sergeant-at-Arms with a military force.  I saw the riot then, and I am afraid I shall see a riot again.”

In the same year (1888) died Mrs. Thomson Hankey, wife of a former M.P. for Peterborough.  Her father, a Mr. Alexander, was born in 1729, and she had inherited from him traditions of London as it appeared to a young Scotsman in the year of the decapitation of the rebels after the rising of 1745.

One of the most venerable and interesting figures in London, down to his death in 1891, was George Thomas, sixth Earl of Albemarle.  He was born in 1799.  He had played bat-trap-and-ball at St. Anne’s Hill with Mr. Fox, and, excepting his old comrade General Whichcote, who outlived him by a few months, was the last survivor of Waterloo.  A man whom I knew longer and more intimately than any of those whom I have described was the late Lord Charles James Fox Russell.  He was born in 1807, and died in 1894.  His father’s groom had led the uproar of London servants which in the eighteenth century damned the play High Life Below Stairs.  He remembered a Highlander who had followed the army of Prince Charles Edward in 1745, and had learned from another Highlander the Jacobite soldiers’ song—­

    “I would I were at Manchester,
    A-sitting on the grass,
    And by my side a bottle of wine,
    And on my lap a lass.”

He had officiated as a page at the coronation of George IV.; had conversed with Sir Walter Scott about The Bride of Lammermoor before its authorship was disclosed; had served in the Blues under Ernest Duke of Cumberland; and had lost his way in trying to find the newly developed quarter of London called Belgrave Square.

Among living[2] links, I hope it is not ungallant to enumerate Lady Georgiana Grey, only surviving child of

    “That Earl, who forced his compeers to be just,
    And wrought in brave old age what youth had planned;”

Lady Louisa Tighe, who as Lady Louisa Lennox buckled the Duke of Wellington’s sword when he set out from her mother’s ball at Brussels for the field of Waterloo; and Miss Eliza Smith of Brighton, the vivacious and evergreen daughter of Horace Smith, who wrote the Rejected Addresses.  But these admirable and accomplished ladies hate garrulity, and the mere mention of their names is a signal to bring these disjointed reminiscences to a close.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Lady Lyndhurst died in 1901.

[2] “Living” alas! no longer.  The last survivor of these ladies died this year, 1903.