The precise period which brought Mr. Hancock to undertake the building of the house in Beacon Street was one in which it might not have been altogether uninteresting to have lived. The affairs of the mother country had been carried on for nearly twenty years of comparative peace, under the dexterous guidance of Sir Robert Walpole,--that cleverest, if not most scrupulous, minister of the British crown,--while my Lord Bolingbroke--permitted to return from France, but living under a qualified attainder, and closely watched by the keen-sighted minister--was occupying himself in writing his bitter and uncompromising pamphlets against the government of the House of Hanover. The minister's son Horace, an elegant, indolent youth, fresh from Cambridge, was travelling on the Continent in company with a shy and sensitive man of letters, not much known at the time,--by the name of Gray. This gentleman gained no small credit, however, some ten or twelve years afterwards, by the publication of "An Elegy written in a Country Churchyard,"--a piece which, notwithstanding the remote date of its appearance, it is possible that some of our readers may have chanced to come across in the course of their literary researches. Giddiness, loss of memory, and other alarming symptoms of mental disorder had begun to attack the great intellect of Dr. Swift, and forced him to lay aside the pen which for nearly half a century had been alternately the scourge and the support of the perplexed cabinets of the time. His friend Mr. Pope, however, was living quite snug and comfortable, on the profits of his translations, at his pretty villa at Twickenham, and adding to his fame and means by the publication of his "Correspondence" and his "Universal Prayer." The learned Rector of Broughton, Dr. Warburton, encouraged by the advice of friends, had just brought out his first volume of "The Divine Legation of Moses"; the Bishop of Bristol had carried his great "Analogy of Religion" through the press the year before; Dr. Watts was getting old and infirm, but still engaged in his thirty years' visit to his friend Sir Thomas Abney, Knight and Alderman, of Abney Park, Stoke Newington. That remarkable young Scotchman, David Hume, was paying his respects to the sensational philosophy of Locke in a series of essays which "spread consternation through every region of existing speculation"; Adam Smith was a promising pupil under Hutcheson,--the father of Scotch metaphysics,--at the University of Glasgow. General Fielding's son Henry--but just married--was spending his charming young wife's portion of fifteen hundred pounds in the careless hospitality of his Derbyshire house-keeping,--three years' experience of which, however, reduced him to the necessity of undertaking his first novel for the booksellers, in the story of "Joseph Andrews." Captain Cook, at the age of thirteen, was a restless apprentice to a haberdasher near Whitby. And although "the age of steam" had certainly not then arrived, it must yet be allowed--in the words of the Highland vagrant to Cameron of Lochiel, not long after--that already