Russell Square--where Lord Loughborough (who knows aught of the Earl of Rosslyn?) had his town house, after leaving Lincoln's Inn Fields, and where Charles Abbott (Lord Tenterden) established himself on leaving the house in Queen Square, into which he married during the summer of 1795--maintained a quasi-fashionable repute much later than the older and therefore more interesting parts of the 'old law quarter.' Theodore Hook's disdain for Bloomsbury is not rightly appreciated by those who fail to bear in mind that the Russell Square of Hook's time was tenanted by people who--though they were unknown to 'fashion,' in the sense given to the word by men of Brummel's habit and tone--had undeniable status amongst the aristocracy and gentry of England. With some justice the witty writer has been charged with snobbish vulgarity because he ridiculed humble Bloomsbury for being humble. His best defence is found in the fact that his extravagant scorn was not directed at helpless and altogether obscure persons so much as at an educated and well-born class who laughed at his caricatures, and gave dinners at which he was proud to be present. Though it fails to clear the novelist of the special charge, this apology has a certain amount of truth; and in so far as it palliates some of his offences against good taste and gentle feeling, by all means let him have the full benefit of it. Criticism can afford to be charitable to the clever, worthless man, now that no one admires or tries to respect him. Again, it may be advanced, in Hook's behalf, that political animosity--a less despicable, though not less hurtful passion than love of gentility--contributed to Hook's dislike of the quarter on the north side of Holborn. As a humorist he ridiculed, as a panderer to fashionable prejudices he sneered at, Bloomsbury; but as a tory he cherished a genuine antagonism to the district of town that was associated in the public mind with the wealth and ascendency of the house of Bedford. Anyhow, the Russell Square neighborhood--although it was no longer fashionable, as Belgravia and Mayfair are fashionable at the present day--remained the locality of many important families, at the time when Mr. Theodore Hook was pleased to assume that no one above the condition of a rich tradesman or second-rate attorney lived in it. Of the lawyers whose names are mournfully associated with the square itself are Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd. In 1818, the year of his destruction by his own hand, Sir Samuel Romilly lived there; and Talfourd had a house on the east side of the square up to the time of his lamented death in 1854.