School, and the Black Coat School. The Grey Coat School has become a school for nearly four hundred girls; their old house still remains for them-a most beautiful monument, built in the seventeenth century for a poorhouse. The great hall in which the paupers formerly lived is now the school hall; above it ran the old low dormitory, now thrown open to the roof; there are paneled old rooms for board rooms; there are broad passages and corridors; there are schoolrooms of later date; and at the back, still uninjured, lie the broad gardens that belong to the time when every house in Westminster had its garden. In any map of London except those of the actual present,—say, in Crutchley's of 1838,-there is laid down in its place, just north of Rochester Row (which is now Artillery Place), St. Margaret's Hospital, otherwise called the Green Coat School. This part of Westminster was once called Palmer's Village; the Hospital was founded by the parish for the benefit of orphans. Charles II. endowed it; the Duchess of Somerset gave the school a thousand pounds; other benefactions flowed in. Forty years ago the place was thus described by a writer who is not often eloquent in praise (Walcott's "Westminster"): "The Hospital of St. Margaret consists of a large quadrangle. Upon the east side are the schoolroom, lavatory, and dormitories. The Master's house fronts the entrance-a detached building ornamented with a bust of the kingly founder, and the Royal arms. painted in colours widely carved and gilded, which were, according to tradition, only preserved from the destructive hands of the Puritans by a thick coating of plaster laid over the obnoxious remembrancers of the rightful dynasty. The south side is formed by the refectory and board room, wainscoted-once, it is said, with old portions of the woodwork which stood in St. Margaret's chancel—to a considerable height, in large panels, upon which are hung full-length paintings of King Charles II., by Sir Peter Lely, and Emery Hill, an ancient benefactor to the institution, in the manner of the same master. Over the mantelpiece is a beautiful portrait of King Charles I., by Vandyke. The windows command a view of the Hospital Garden, with its fragrant flower-beds and grassy plots a pleasant relief to the eye wearied with the interminable brick buildings of the outer street, and well attesting the constant care bestowed upon it. "Upon this foundation are maintained twenty-nine boys, who wear a long green skirt, bound round with a red girdle, similar in form to that worn by the boys of Christ's Hospital." Where is this lovely place now? It is gone. On its site are some branches of the Army and Navy Stores. Think what a city loses by the destruction of such a place! The daily object-lesson in our duty to the friendless and the helpless; the memory of bygone worthies; the sentiment of brotherhood. That is one way of considering the loss. Another way is to think of it as a place of singular beauty, of such beauty as we cannot possibly reproduce. And we have willfully and needlessly destroyed it! It is a national disaster of the gravest, the most irreparable kind, that such monuments as old almshouses, old City churches, old schools, old gates, old foundations of any kind, should be given over to any body of men, with permission to tear down and destroy at their will, and under pretense of benefiting the parish. Can one benefit a man by destroying his memory? Can one im |