Map of District
covered by
Wanderings in Piccadilly
Mayfair & Pall Mall
Eastern Section
Scale:- 8 Inches to 1 Mile.

Wanderings in Piccadilly
Mayfair and
Pall Mall

GARDENS OF CARLTON HOUSE IN 1784.

Wanderings in London
Piccadilly, Mayfair
and Pall Mall

By

E. BERESFORD CHANCELLOR, M.A.
F.R. Hist: Soc:
Author of
“The Squares of London,” ETC.

WITH
TWENTY ILLUSTRATIONS OF OLD LONDON
(Four of them in Colour)

JAMES POTT & CO.
New York

1909

WANDERINGS IN LONDON
PICCADILLY, MAYFAIR
AND PALL MALL

To facilitate the “Wanderings”
of inexperienced pilgrims, more
especially of those from America, a

MAP OF THE DISTRICT

will be found within the two covers
of the book; that in the front giving
the more eastern, and that in the
back the more western limits of the
district concerned.

WARD & CO.
Colour Printers
33 & 34 Craven Street
Charing Cross
London, W.C.

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

Old London vanishes, another London takes its place; the interesting old spots associated with the leisurely life and refinement of the century that has gone, are being swept away one by one. In many ways we would welcome a return of those dear old days, with their appreciation of the belles lettres and the fine arts, and with all their oddities and quaint customs, but they have gone for ever. They played their part in the development of the national life: to us they are but memories.

We owe no small debt of gratitude, however, to those who—like the author—amidst all the changes that are taking place, have tried to keep alive for us with pen and pencil, a remembrance of a period so different from our own. Especially, perhaps, will many of our American cousins recognise this debt when in their migrations they try to hunt up places of interest connected with their English forbears.

Mr. Chancellor is most happy as he takes us round the old streets and houses, and gives—as it were—almost personal introductions to the quaint and interesting people who inhabited them. His pages are sentient with living personages, and as we read we forget the years that have rolled away, while we enjoy the laugh and quip with the interesting old characters which are met with at every turn and corner.

To begin one’s peregrinations at the corner of Bond Street and Piccadilly seems at first sight a little arbitrary, but one soon realises that in starting from “Stewart’s,” and keeping within a half-mile radius of this centre, one is really covering by far the most interesting portion of the West End; while the old shop, which—during more than two centuries—has given its name to this corner of Bond Street, and which, as Mr. Chancellor declares, is to Americans one of the best known spots in Europe, is in itself a most interesting link with the past and present.

The Author, and the Publishers, acknowledge with thanks their indebtedness to Edward Gardner, Esq., for kind permission to reproduce six views of Old London from his unique Collection of Drawings and Prints.

Contents.

PRESS OPINIONS.

“A good little book for pilgrims, ‘more especially,’ as it states, ‘those from America,’ who wish to recognise the multitude of distinguished ghosts who crowd the district dealt with.”—Graphic.

“Always readable and interesting. The chief attraction of the book, which, by the way, is charmingly ‘got up,’ is to be found in the twenty plate illustrations of Old London streets and houses. Four are successful reproductions in colour.”—Antiquarian.

“In this pretty little book ... these notes on the heart of the West End are made to gyrate round Stewart’s Tea Rooms at the corner of Bond Street, called ‘Stewart’s Corner.’ The publisher seems to have felt that to assume this shop to be the hub of the best part of London is sufficiently remarkable to require explanation, so he writes:—‘To begin one’s peregrinations at the corner of Bond Street and Piccadilly seems at first sight a little arbitrary, but one soon realizes that in starting from “Stewart’s” and keeping within a half-mile radius of this centre, one is really covering by far the most interesting portion of the West End.’ The plates, which are mostly reproductions of old prints, are singularly interesting (especially the coloured ones), and are themselves worth the price of the book.”—Athenæum.

“Mr. Chancellor guides the reader round the old streets and houses, introducing him personally, as it were, to the quaint and interesting people who inhabited them.”—The Queen.

“A little book gathering up in a quite popular way some of the associations of the district, with many illustrations of it as it appeared in the past.”—“Times” Literary Supplement.

“The author of ‘The Squares of London’ has in a high degree the faculties of selection and concentration, and in his hundred and fifty pages he has been able to tell us so much and to tell it so well.”—Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News.

“There is no lack of interest, past and present, in the district about which our author discourses. Piccadilly is notorious for its ‘ghosts’; and St. James’s Street, Park Lane, Grosvenor Square, Pall Mall, Albemarle Street, to name a few places at random, have an abundant population of the same kind. This little volume, which is judiciously illustrated, makes good reading.”—The Spectator.

“A pretty little book this, with charming illustrations of the West End in days of old, four of them in colour. The pages are rich in brief anecdote, as well as topographical details of interest.”—The Lady’s Pictorial.

“It is just the book for the Londoner who is always interested in the old spots that are being swept away one by one; and the novice who knows nothing of the subject will be fascinated by these pictures of former days.”—Methodist Times.

“Those who are interested in this class of literature will find Mr. Chancellor’s book interesting, all the more so if they have some acquaintance with the English literature of the last two centuries. The area covered is large, but there is no lack of interest, past and present, in our author’s discoursings about it. The volume is judiciously illustrated.”—Catholic Times.

“Pictures of St. James’s Street in George the Third’s reign, the palace at the foot in the days of the Stuarts, Carlton House during the Regency, together with various old inns, mansions, and other vanished buildings, combine to make an illustrated gallery of a departed era.”—The Bookseller.

“Famous streets, famous buildings, famous men. Mr. Chancellor catalogues them in an agreeable literary form, with plenty of notes and incidents and historic origins.”—The Globe.

“Mr. Chancellor’s small volume is among the best. It has a real literary flavour, and is full of reminiscences of times long past. The twenty illustrations of old London (four of them in colour) are particularly well chosen.”—Publishers’ Circular.

“A compact memorial volume like this is of special value. We are conducted round the fine old streets and famous houses, and are given almost personal introductions to the famous and quaint folk who inhabited them.”—Christian Commonwealth.

“In hunting up places of interest connected with our forbears, the author has endeavoured, and successfully, to keep alive for us a remembrance of a past period.”—Broad Arrow.

“A pleasant sketch describing the West End of London in the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century, drawing a vivid picture of life in that part of London at that time, and giving details concerning many famous buildings.”—Record.

“This charming little work must needs be invaluable to all lovers of London, among whom the author reckons our American cousins, for whose more especial benefit he has given a map of the district in two parts, one representing the Eastern and the other the Western limits of his rambles.”—Western Morning News.

“Mr. Chancellor recalls many historical facts about these old streets and houses, re-peopling them with English men and women of long ago, telling anecdotes and gossiping in pleasantest manner.”—Yorkshire Daily Post.

“There is much to be learned from these pages how these parts of London came to be built, and why the streets bear various strange names, of which Maddox is one.”—Nottingham Guardian.

“The author of ‘The Squares of London’ has undoubtedly done a great deal to keep alive for us, with a ready and able pen, memories of the old London which are tending to become less and less distinct with the march of time and the rush of new ideas.”—Huddersfield Examiner.

“The book is full of delightful gossip regarding the clubs, theatres, and great houses of past and present times.”—The Northern Whig.

“A capital and interesting book of its kind, full of pleasant reminiscences of the days of the leisurely life and refinement of the century that has gone.”—Manchester Evening News.

“The volume is well illustrated, and the reproductions from old prints and drawings of mansions which have altogether disappeared—as, for instance, Northumberland House, with its famous lion—are particularly interesting.”—Glasgow Herald.

“This admirable book is packed full of historical and biographical information, retailed in the pleasantest possible manner.”—Liverpool Daily Courier.

“Mr. Chancellor is an excellent cicerone in describing for us the old streets and houses and the quaint people who inhabited them.”—Yorkshire Herald.

“With this little book in his pocket (where it will hardly reveal itself), or on his table, the visitor to London can add greatly to his enjoyment.”—Aberdeen Journal.

“A delightful little guide to the localities mentioned.”—Aberdeen Free Press.

“With this book in the coat pocket—to glance at in convenient corners—one could spend some pleasant hours.”—Bolton Journal.

List of Plates.

*From the Collection of Edward Gardner, Esq.

CHAPTER I.

PICCADILLY.

“By night or by day, whether noisy or stilly,

Whatever my mood is—I love Piccadilly.”

Locker-Lampson.

Dr. Johnson in one of his rhetorical flights said that Charing Cross was practically the centre of the universe. “I think,” he observed to Boswell, on a celebrated occasion, “the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross.” Theodore Hook, on the other hand, considered that that small area in St. James’s, bounded by Piccadilly and Pall Mall, St. James’s Street and Waterloo Place, was the acme of fashion, and contained within itself all that was best worth cultivating in the Metropolis.

Like all generalizations, neither of these dicta will bear the test of logical analysis. Hook’s favourite quarter has undergone many a change, and its present-day equivalent is more likely to be found in that larger area known to all the world as Mayfair. Similarly, although much of the tide of human existence still flows past the spot where Queen Eleanor’s body rested for the last time, on its way to the Abbey, that tide flows as fully and with as much noisy vehemence past half a hundred other crowded spots in London. It is probable, however, that at no one point does it surge and rage (to carry on the metaphor), with greater force than at the spot where Piccadilly and Bond Street join. At this spot stands “Stewart’s”—famed all the world over. I say “Stewart’s,” as I should say in Venice, “Florian’s,” or in New York, “Delmonico’s”; for there are certain famous establishments in all great cities which require no more specific designation.

Who is there, indeed, that knows not Stewart’s? It has been presiding over this corner for the last two hundred years and more. It must be the oldest baker’s and confectioner’s business in London, beside which even such ancient houses as “Birch’s” or “Gunter’s” are comparatively modern. To-day it bears upon its rebuilt front, the date of its establishment—1688, and the massive foundations and old brickwork, which were brought to light during the recent rebuilding, fully support the theory that this was one of the original buildings erected by Sir Thomas Bond on the site of Clarendon House, when he laid out the street which bears his name.

Let us take this shop, as characteristic of many others, and try to recall what it may have witnessed in the lapse of years. In its early days it was, no doubt, too much occupied with its own affairs to take much note of great personages or historic events; but after it had settled down, so to speak, and had become, as it did, the purveyor of the staff of life to the Coffee-houses that had sprung up around it, it may be supposed to have given an eye, now and then, to the interesting men and beautiful women who passed by, or who made it a rendezvous while some of them waited for those who were spending or making fortunes in the gambling hells of St. James’s Street hard by.

Stewart’s Corner
Old Bond Sᵗ & Piccadilly
REBVILT 1907.

The Augustan age is here! Can that little shrivelled body limping along, having just come from its lodging in Berkeley Street, contain the great mind of Alexander Pope? Surely ’tis he, having but this moment penned a letter to Martha Blount, or put the finishing touches to his “Farewell to London.” He is probably on his way to visit my lord Burlington, whose home (the precursor of the later mansion built by his great grandson, and now known by the massive buildings of the modern Burlington House), is close by. Horace Walpole tells us that when asked why he built his mansion so far out of town, the first Earl replied, “Because he was determined to have no building beyond him!” Credite posteri! but he meant, and should have added, “to the north,” which is, in itself, wonderful enough for us to realize now, for Clarendon House and Berkeley House were already in existence to the west. Could it have been Pope, who asked the question? It seems likely, for we remember the anecdote of the irate gentleman who being in the poet’s company and required to give a definition of “a point of interrogation,” replied “that it was a little crooked thing that asked questions!”

And then that fine looking man in the full bottomed wig, can that be Mr. Addison of the Spectator, fresh from his lodgings in the Haymarket hard by, and still glowing in the reflected glory of “The Campaign?” None other. And lo! here is the handsome face of his hero, who “taught the doubtful battle where to rage,” as he hobbles along (he will soon be off to Bath to try and cure his gout)—fit indeed, monstrari digito, for other things besides his military glory. He will not turn in at Stewart’s we may be sure, for if the “tears of dotage” have not yet begun to flow, at least he is learning to save his money.

Here, too, comes jolly Dick Steele; he has just been into a coffee house to pen a line of excuse to his “dearest Prue,” in Kensington Square, and is on his way to a jollification with some of his boon companions; forgetful of his “Apology,” and hardly living up to the ethics of his “Christian Hero.” Still with all his faults, a pleasanter figure to meet than that dark-faced, dissatisfied-looking man in clerical attire. That is the redoubtable Dean Swift himself, one of the great geniuses, not only of his own day, but of all time. He knows this part of the town as well as he knows all the turns and twists of contemporary politics; and has probably come from his rooms in Ryder Street almost opposite. Wherever he is he will be penning that famous “Journal to Stella,” or plotting and planning with the heads of the Opposition—and there is no clearer or more potent brain among them. If he goes into the St. James’ Coffee House, or White’s Chocolate House, “the most fashionable hell in London,” or trudges further east to Willis’s, in Bow Street, be sure there will be plenty to note his strange manner and call him “the mad parson!” Perchance he may be taking the air to prepare himself for that particular dinner with my Lord Abercorn when there smoked upon the board the “fine fat haunch of venison, that smelt rarely on one side,” which he mentions, with such gusto, in his journal; or perhaps he is setting out on one of his long rambles to Chelsea to dine with the Dean of Carlisle, or to sup with Lord Mountjoy at Kensington Gravel Pits.

An observant traveller who visited London about this period, remarks that “Most of the streets are wonderfully well lighted, for in front of each house hangs a lantern or a large globe of glass, inside of which is placed a lamp which burns all night.” The light which hung before “Stewart’s” must have illuminated the face of many a “toast,” many a “Macaroni,” as they came up Bond Street, and sometimes that of one of those terrible “mohocks.” My Lord Mohun, not yet dreaming of his sanguinary and fatal encounter with his grace of Hamilton, but sufficiently notorious for that mysterious affair when Mountfort the player fell mortally wounded near his lodging in Norfolk Street; the eccentric Duke of Wharton, who once sent a bear to his tutor as an appropriate concomitant to his “bearish conduct”; who, marrying at sixteen, became a sort of Jacobite hero, and showed by some of his writings in “The True Briton,” what gifts he had squandered by a riotous life; and who finally ended his career in a Bernardine Convent, “the scorn and wonder of our days,” as Pope writes, “a sad outcast of each church and state.” Hervey, the “Sporus” of the same bitter pen, having dragged himself for a space from the Court, of which he was so characteristic an ornament, and from the company of the Princess who secretly loved him. Perhaps he will to-morrow fight, behind Arlington House, hard by, with Pulteney, who called him “a thing below contempt.” That slip of the foot at the critical moment saved the “thin-spun life,” and like so many protagonists in such encounters, the whilom enemies embrace, with more fervour on Pulteney’s part than on that of “My Lord” who but bows in silence and withdraws.

And then what a galaxy of beauty reflects the light from that “lantern or large globe of glass!” Here is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, not very much affected by the virulent lines of the “wicked wasp of Twickenham”; the lovely Molly Lepel, who married Lord Hervey, and whom Lady Suffolk loved so much; Mary Bellenden, afterwards Mrs. Campbell, another of those maids of honour whom Gay and Prior sung, and Swift and Arbuthnot undertook to prove the best wives, although we remember that the coachman at Leicester House solemnly forbade his son ever to think of any of them in so tender a way! Here, too, is Lady Mary Coke, who was used to almost regard herself as a royal widow, on the death of Edward Duke of York—for which “mealy faced boy” she had a “tendre”; the Duchess of Queensberry, Prior’s “Kitty ever fair,” whom Walpole thought looked “(by twilight) like a young beauty of an old-fashioned century,” and who died in Savile Row, in 1777, “of a surfeit of cherries.”

The list might be indefinitely extended, but “Anni labuntur” and other centuries are hurrying us along, bringing new faces in their train; George Selwyn with his witty talk and mania for executions; he is off now, probably to see John Rann, or “Sixteen-stringed Jack,” as he was called, strung up at Tyburn tree—my Lord Pembroke accompanies him, and the cronies chancing to meet a lot of young chimney sweeps who beg for money, Selwyn suddenly addresses them solemnly with the words “I have often heard of the sovereignty of the people. I suppose your highnesses are in Court mourning;” Charles James Fox, the most eminent of those “sons of faro,” who having lost his last penny and consoled himself by reading Homer in the small hours, is thinking of a “passover” to the Continent, which, as Selwyn says, will not be relished by the Jews; Lord March may also be seen, the wicked “old Q” of many a notorious story; and Hare—“the hare with many friends,” as his acquaintances nick-named him; and then the dandies of a later day; Alvanley, who succeeded Selwyn as a wit and almost rivalled Brummell as a dandy; “Ball” Hughes and “Teapot” Crawfurd; Lord Yarmouth and Prince Esterhazy; Jack Lee, and the great Brummell himself, who has cut the Regent and is thinking of bringing the old king into fashion!

These, and how many others, have not passed by that corner in Piccadilly where Stewart’s stands; they are but the ghosts of the beauties and exquisites of a bygone day that loiter there—for in this strenuous age no one dawdles—all is hurry and confusion, and the idle stroller, other than Thespian, is almost a thing of the past. Let us for the moment try to imitate our forbears and “take a walk down Piccadilly.”

What changes have not taken place in this street of streets! It was known by the quaint name it still bears as early as 1633, for Gerarde in his famous Herbal, mentions “the wild bu-glosse,” that “grows about the drie ditch-bankes about Pickadilla.” This is not the place to go into the mysteries of nomenclature, and many have been the theories as to the origin of the name; but that is probably the correct solution which traces it to the ruffs called Pickadils, worn by the gallants of James’s and Charles’s time. Blount in his “Glossography” (1656) thus speaks of the matter: “A Pickadil is that round hem, or the several divisions set together about the skirt of a garment or other thing; also a kind of stiff collar, made in fashion of a band. Hence, perhaps, the famous ordinary near St. James’s, called Pickadilly, took denomination, because it was then the utmost, or skirt house of the suburbs, that way.”

Thus Blount, and I think we may leave it at that. We shall return later on to the “famous ordinary,” which was known as Pickadilla Hall, and was situated at the north-east corner of the Haymarket: now we are on our way west, like the wise men of old.[1]

ALBEMARLE STREET.

The first tributary street we come to is Albemarle Street, formed, at the same time as Bond Street, about 1684, by Sir Thomas Bond, on the site of Clarendon House, which the great Lord Clarendon built from the designs of Pratt, according to Evelyn, on ground which had been granted him by Charles II., in 1664. The Diarist had “never seen a nobler pile,” and he had every opportunity for criticising it thoroughly as, on one occasion, the Chancellor himself showed him all over it; and the extant views of it fully confirm Evelyn’s enthusiasm. The populace, however, saw in the great place the results of bribery and corruption, and Dunkirk House, Holland House, and Tangier House, were titles freely applied to it. On Clarendon’s death, the house was sold (1675) to the second duke of Albemarle (the son of the great Monk) for £26,000 (it had cost £40,000 originally). In consequence of extravagance in all sorts of ways, however, its new owner was not long able to keep it, and he in turn sold it, it is said, for £20,000, to Sir Thomas Bond, who pulled it down and built Albemarle Street (then called Albemarle Buildings), and Bond Street on its site. Evelyn, on September 18th, 1683, notes that he “walked to survey the sad demolition of Clarendon House, that costly and only sumptuous palace of the late Lord Chancellor Hyde,” “where,” he adds, “I have often been so cheerful with him and sometimes so sad.”

Clarendon Hovse
(From a print of the period.)

Albemarle Street, “of excellent new buildings, inhabited by persons of quality,” as the New View of London (1708) describes it, has had some interesting inhabitants. Here, in 1712, Sir William Wyndham and his family escaped in their night clothes from the fire that destroyed his house, for which he had given £6,000, as he told Swift, when many rare pictures and other valuables were destroyed; here, in Lord Grantham’s house, lived for a time the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., until he moved to Leicester House. Bishop Berkeley was lodging at Mr. Fox’s (an apothecary’s) in this street, from 1724 to 1726, as he records in his “Literary Relics,” and Sir Richard Mead, who formed that fine collection of drawings subsequently added to the Royal Collection, resided here in 1720.

Many years later the Duc de Nivernois was lodging in the street, and here received on one occasion Gibbon “more as a man of letters than as a man of fashion,” much to the latter’s chagrin. Lord Bute, another minister who became, as Clarendon had done, an object of popular hatred, was living here in 1764; and there is a story told by Lord Malmesbury, that when a Mr. Calvert asked in the House of Commons “Where is Athens? What is become of Lacedæmon?” some member of the Opposition called out that “they had gone to Albemarle Street.”

It is obviously possible to do little more than mention the names of some of the other distinguished residents in Albemarle Street. Here lived Zoffany, the painter, who executed, about this period, a portrait of Wilkes, “looking—no, squinting—at his daughter,” as Walpole records: Robert Adam, the architect of so many fine dwellings, died here, in 1792, and his brother James two years later, at No. 13; Charles James Fox was living here when Rogers first knew him; Sir James Mackintosh was at No. 26, on his return from India in 1811, and “Leonidas” Glover, died in a house here, in 1785.

Albemarle Street has been noted for its hotels. Here was Dorant’s, where Byron stayed, when he was publishing his “Hours of Idleness”; and the famous Grillion’s, where Louis XVIII. in exile held his Court.

The name of Byron brings us appropriately enough to No. 50, Albemarle Street—for here the great publishing firm of Murray, so closely connected with his name, has been settled since John Murray removed hither from Fleet Street, in 1812.

The columnar façade of the Royal Institution, the work of Vulliamy, forms a curiously solemn note in Albemarle Street, but its importance as a great scientific centre more than justifies its severe, almost melancholy, appearance.

DOVER STREET.

Dover Street, to which we come a few steps further west, was built about 1686, and was named after Henry Jermyn, Lord Dover. He lived in a house which was subsequently advertised for sale in the “Daily Journal” for January, 1727. It would appear that after his death his widow had been residing here, for the notice indicates that the cause of the sale was that lady’s decease. Mention is particularly made of a beautiful staircase painted by Laguerre, as well as “all manner of conveniences for a great family.” The house was on the east side, and not far from it, Evelyn came to dwell in 1699, having taken the lease of a residence on the same side of the street. That mad Duke of Wharton whom I have already mentioned, also lived in Dover Street, “in a most sumptuous building, finely finished and furnished”; so did the great Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, as well as his son, the second Earl, who married the heiress of the Duke of Newcastle. Pope used to stay here as a guest at this time; and as Arbuthnot was also living in the same street these two friends would often, we are to suppose, discuss that “half pint of claret” which the latter humorously told Pope, he could still afford. Another of this coterie, Bolingbroke, was wont to lodge at “Mr. Chetwynd’s,” as Gay informs Swift, probably with a view to a philosophic, albeit, a merry meeting there. Sir William Wyndham was also a former resident; so was Miss Reynolds, the sister of Sir Joshua, whom Johnson used to visit; Lord King, the biographer of Locke; Archdeacon Coxe, who wrote ponderous tomes about Sir Robert Walpole and the House of Austria, and Nash, the architect, who built the more imposing portion of Regent Street.

But the two most interesting houses were (for one has disappeared, and its site is covered by a mushroom block of red brick flats, and although the other still remains, it is empty and will probably soon go the way of all old buildings) Ashburnham House and Ely House.

The former, with its gateway and lodge designed by Robert Adam in 1773, was the town house of the Earls of Ashburnham, but others beside that family occasionally inhabited it, and for a time it was the Russian Embassy; Prince Lieven being the first ambassador residing here, and Pozzo di Borgo the last.

Ely House, designed by Sir Robert Taylor, has been, since 1772, the town residence of the Bishops of Ely, and was conveyed to that See in exchange for Ely Place, Holborn.

Dover Street has always been rather famous for its hotels, and in this respect at least, its reputation is well sustained. Le Telier’s was one of the older ones, and is notable as being the house to which the Literary Club moved from Sackville Street, before going into St. James’s Street.

THE WHITE HORSE CELLAR.

Just before we reach Berkeley Street, we come to Hatchett’s Restaurant, the old “White Horse Cellar,” so named from the emblem in the crest of the House of Hanover. The old original “White Horse Cellar,” whence in the good old days the coaches left on their way to the west, stood nearly opposite, close to Arlington Street. As may be seen from old sporting prints, the outside of the original house was covered on particular occasions with oil lights of various colours—lights which many a jaded traveller must have seen with pleasure, and many a fresh one left with regret. One of these occasions was the King’s birthday, when the coachmen and guards donned new scarlet liveries, and even the coaches were touched up. Sir Vincent Cotton, Capt. Probyn, Lord Worcester and Sir Thomas Jones were among the amateur whips who frequently handled the ribbons and tooled their coaches down the intricacies of Piccadilly; and we can quite believe Hazlitt when he says that “the finest sight in the metropolis is the setting off of the mail coaches from Piccadilly.”

THE WHITE HORSE CELLAR—HATCHETT’S RESTAURANT—PICCADILLY
(From a Drawing by George Cruikshank.)

How many of us would not have given a good round sum to have seen Mr. Pickwick laboriously climb on to the top of the vehicle which was to carry him to Bath, or Sam Weller’s surprise when he observed the name of “Pickwick” painted on the coach door; or “the young man of the name of Guppy,” meeting Esther Summerson here on her arrival in London one foggy afternoon in November; or Jerry Hawthorn “fairly knocked up by all the excitement, getting into the coach”—being one of six inside, “what time his friends shake him by the hand, whilst the Jews hang round with oranges, knives and sealing wax, whilst the guard is closing the door.” All we can do is to rehabilitate the scene of the former from Dickens’s pen; and to imagine ourselves watching the latter in Cruickshank’s drawing.

Another hostelry from which coaches departed on their long journeys was the “Gloucester Coffee House,” kept by one Dale, which stood where the Berkeley Hotel, formerly known as the St. James’s Hotel, is now; and “The Green Man and Still” was yet another house of call for the coaches that went westward.

BERKELEY STREET.

Berkeley Street, formerly known as Berkeley Row, boasts one or two interesting residents in the past. Here Cosway dwelt, and it was here that he first attracted the notice of the Prince of Wales, whose portrait he “drew in little” so often and so successfully. In the same house, too, had previously lived Shackleton, the portrait painter; and it was to a residence here that Mr. Chaworth was carried after his duel with Lord Byron (the great uncle of the Lord Byron), which took place at the “Star and Garter,” in Pall Mall, over a dispute as to the best way of preserving game. Lord Byron, the survivor, underwent his trial in Westminster Hall, but was acquitted, and a certain French traveller, M. Grosley, who was present at the trial, saw his lordship a few days later taking part in the debate on the Regency Bill, as if nothing had happened.

DEVONSHIRE HOUSE.

The long front of Devonshire House, with its fine gates, which were originally at the Duke’s place at Chiswick, now faces us. It was erected from the designs of Kent, for the third Duke of Devonshire, two years after Berkeley House had been burnt down (in 1733). Its beautiful grounds are only divided from those of Lansdowne House by Lansdowne Passage, a short cut, sunk below the ground level, from Curzon Street to Hay Hill. There are iron bars at each end of this passage, and probably few people know why they were placed there. As a matter of fact, they were put up in consequence of a mounted highwayman in the eighteenth century, after having got away from Piccadilly with some booty, riding his horse through this passage and up the steps at the end. Thomas Grenville is the authority for this anecdote, and the robber was seen galloping past his residence in Bolton Street.

THE GLOUCESTER COFFEE HOUSE, PICCADILLY.

Devonshire House is one of the great houses of London, and is full of Art treasures, a list of which alone would fill a volume; particularly remarkable is the collection of drawings by the old masters, which includes the original “Liber Veritatis” of Claude de Lorraine; and a superb collection of engravings by Marc Antonio—to mention but these. In the library is the great Kemble collection of old plays, including the first four folios of Shakespeare’s works, &c., which the sixth Duke bought for £2,000. What are they not worth now?

The portico replaced, in 1840, the old entrance which was by a flight of steps on each side; and among the other improvements made by the sixth Duke was the addition of a fine marble staircase up which all the great ones of several generations have passed, from the days when the beautiful Duchess welcomed Fox here, and the Prince Regent, “surrounded by the first Whig families in the country,” stood to see the apotheosis of the “man of the people” after the Westminster election, to days within memory, when Dickens and his friends acted here for charity.

STRATTON STREET.

Beyond Devonshire House is Stratton Street, which is, of course, named after Lord Berkeley, the hero of Stratton fight. Although there have been one or two interesting people living in this street in the past, such as Campbell, the poet, who was here in 1802; James Douglas, the author of “Nenia Britannica”; and Lord Lynedoch, who was second in command in the Peninsula, the chief interest attaching to it is the fact that at No. 1, which belonged to Coutts, the banker, and looks on to Piccadilly, lived for many years, until her death quite recently, the venerable Baroness Burdett-Coutts. The house next door, No. 80, Piccadilly, with its old-fashioned front and painted glass windows to the ground floor rooms, was for many years the residence of her father, Sir Francis Burdett, and it was from here that, in 1810, he was taken to the Tower. For two days he successfully barricaded himself in the house, but entrance being eventually forced, he was found, somewhat theatrically, teaching one of his children Magna Charta. The riots consequent on this incarceration are mentioned at length in many of the letters and diaries of the period; and the soldiers, for their share in suppressing them, were termed “Piccadilly Butchers.”

The house next door (No. 81) stands on the site of the celebrated Watier’s Club, established in 1807. Watier had been cook to the Prince of Wales, and although his gastronomic skill was unquestionable, and although Brummell was the presiding genius (or, was it because of that fact?), the club, which had been the ruin of many a member, only existed for about 12 years, according to Gronow, whose well-known story of its origin, may be repeated here:—

“Upon one occasion some gentlemen of both White’s and Brookes’s had the honour to dine with the Prince Regent, and, during the conversation, the Prince inquired what sort of dinner they got at their clubs, upon which Sir Thomas Stepney, one of the guests, observed, ‘that their dinners were always the same, the eternal joints or beefsteaks, the boiled fowl with oyster sauce, and an apple-tart; this is what we have at our clubs, and very monotonous fare it is.’ The Prince, without further remark, rang the bell for his cook, Watier, and in the presence of those who dined at the Royal table, asked him whether he would take a house and organize a dinner-club. Watier assented, and named Madison, the Prince’s page, manager, and Labourie, from the Royal kitchen, the cook.”

It was here that once, on Brummell’s calling with a tragic air to a waiter to bring a pistol, for he had been losing heavily, one of the members, Bob Leigh, who proved to be mad, said, “Mr. Brummell, if you really wish to put an end to your existence, I am extremely happy to offer you the means,” at the same time producing two loaded pistols from his pockets and laying them on the table; and here, too, Jack Bouverie threw his bowl of counters at the head of Raikes who had been making some ill-timed jests at his losses.

BOLTON STREET.

Bolton Street here joins Piccadilly. Formed in 1699, it was described by Hatton, a few years later, as “the most westerly street in London, between the road to Knightsbridge, south, and the Fields, north.” Here both Martha and Theresa Blount once lived, and were called the “Young Ladies in Bolton Street” by their admirer, Pope. The poet not only visited them here, but was also occasionally the guest of the eccentric Earl of Peterborough, who lived in the same street for fourteen years, from 1710. George Grenville, also resided in Bolton Street, as did another politician, Lord Melbourne; and at least three notable ladies are connected with this vicinity, Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay), who came to live in the street in 1818, shortly after the death of General D’Arblay, and was visited by Scott and Rogers and many another fashionable and literary notabilities; Mrs. Delany, who lived in the adjoining Bolton Row in 1753; and Mrs. Vesey, whose evening parties probably kept the quieter denizens of the street awake o’nights.

If, as is sometimes reported, Prince Charles Edward really did pay a visit to London in 1760, and was present at the Coronation, then he set out for the Abbey from a house in Bolton Street, for here he is said to have lodged, without even “the semblance of a kingly crown” about his brows.

BATH HOUSE.

When Horace Walpole, who loved not his father’s old enemy, Lord Bath, wrote on one occasion that “the grass grows just before my Lord Bath’s door, whom nobody will visit,” he indicated the large house still known as Bath House which occupies much of the western side of Bolton Street, and which was originally built by William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, on whom so many bitter epigrams were written, and whose parsimony was so notorious. As an example of the former, I may remind the reader of those lines “written on the Earl of Bath’s door in Piccadilly,” by Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, which run thus:

“Here dead to fame lives patriot Will,

His grave a lordly seat,

His title proves his epitaph,

His robes his winding sheet.”

As a proof of the latter, is extant the story that having visited Holkham, and forgetting to tip the servants, a pang of conscience spurred his lordship to send back a horseman six miles, with half a crown. An even better illustration of his ostentation and meanness combined is preserved by George Colman, who relates that when driving through the lodge gates of his country house, word would be given to halt; the outriders repeated the order, the coachman pulled up his four horses, and from the becoronetted carriage, William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, Viscount Pulteney, of Evington, Baron of Hedon, P.C., F.R.S., etc., etc., would stretch forth his arm and drop into the palm of the curtseying gatekeeper—a halfpenny!

After Lord Bath’s death, his brother and inheritor of his vast fortune, occupied Bath House for three years, when he also departing to the land of shades (Charon got but small tips from these Adelphi it may be presumed), the place was let to the Duke of Portland. In 1821, Alexander Baring bought it and rebuilt the mansion. He was created Lord Ashburton fourteen years later, and was the head of the great banking house, which the Duc de Richelieu once said was the sixth great power in Europe. Under the Ashburton régime, Carlyle, who was more friendly with Lady Ashburton than Mrs. Carlyle always approved of, was a frequent visitor here. In our days it has been the town house of the millionaire Baron Hirsch, and is now the residence of Sir Julius Wernher, so that it would appear to have always been associated with worldly riches and well-known names.

CLUBS OF PICCADILLY.

At this point begins that remarkable series of clubs for which Piccadilly is almost as famous as Pall Mall; indeed, between the United Empire Club at No. 84, and the Lyceum, at No. 128, there are a good baker’s dozen of these “assemblies of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions,” as Dr. Johnson defined them. Those in this quarter of the town are for the most part comparatively modern, and I believe I am right in saying that not one of their names will be found included in Timbs’ interesting work on “Clubs and Club Life.” It would form but monotonous reading to set them all down here, and I should be arrogating to myself by doing so the functions of the compiler of Directories were I to attempt it, but as we go along, one or two will require a word chiefly from the fact of their inhabiting houses which are otherwise interesting.

CLARGES STREET.

Clarges Street, however, for a moment, intervenes before we come to one of them. It was formed between 1716 and 1718, by Sir Walter Clarges, on ground adjoining Clarges House, the residence of his father, Sir Thomas, who, it will be remembered, was the brother-in-law of the great Duke of Albemarle. Like all the streets in this neighbourhood, it is connected with many a well-known name; Mrs. Delany, the friend of George III. and Queen Charlotte; Miss O’Neil, the beautiful actress, who nearly extinguished Mrs. Charles Kemble, and created a furore by her rendering of “Juliet” at the Dublin theatre; Edmund Kean, whom no one could extinguish, and who is said to have kept a tame puma in his house; the beautiful Emma Hart, better known as Lady Hamilton; William Mitford, who wrote the story of Grecian prowess, and was himself a Colonel of Militia; Mrs. Carter, that learned lady, who introduced Epictetus to the unlearned; and Lord Macaulay, who remembered everything, and was called by Lord Melbourne “a book in breeches,” highly to the amusement of Queen Victoria. These are some of the great ones who have left their record on the houses in Clarges Street.

HALF MOON STREET.

Half Moon Street, close by, which takes its name from an old inn with this sign, one of the many public houses which at one time congregated in this quarter, of which the “Hercules Pillars,” the “Swan,” the “Golden Lion,” the “Horse Shoe,” the “Barleymow,” and the “White Horse,” may be mentioned—was formed about 1730. Boswell once lodged here, and on his own shewing, gave admirable dinners, “and some claret,” to such as Hume and Franklin; Garrick and Oglethorpe. Madame D’Arblay’s last residence was also here, over a linen-draper’s shop; and here, “in a little, projecting window,” might once have been seen “all day long, book in hand, with lively gestures and bright eyes,” the poet Shelley; so that someone said he only wanted a pan of water and some fresh turf “to look like a young lady’s bird, hanging outside for air and song.” Here, too, it was, while stepping into her carriage, that the notorious Lola Montes, was arrested in 1849, on a charge of bigamy.

CAMBRIDGE HOUSE.

For a moment a break in the succession of tributary streets, gives us pause to return to some of the more interesting houses in Piccadilly itself; and one of the most noticeable of these is that once known as Cambridge House, but now as the Naval and Military or “In and Out” Club, the latter colloquial designation having its simple origin in the large “In” and “Out” directions for drivers, at its two entrances. This fine house has had at least four names, for, besides those given, it was originally known as Egremont House, and later as Cholmondeley House. It took its first title from the second Earl of Egremont, who died here in 1763 “of an apoplexy, which from his figure was reasonably to be expected,” writes Lord Chesterfield. The third Earl, whom Mrs. Delany thought “a pretty man,” and even Horace Walpole allowed to be handsome, also lived here for a time. The name of the house was changed to Cholmondeley House when the first Marquis of Cholmondeley was residing here. He had been Chamberlain to the Prince of Wales in 1795, and was, after George IV.’s accession, Lord Steward of the Household; he died in 1827, and some years later the old Duke of Cambridge (father of the late Duke) came to reside here, when the designation of the house was again changed to that of its owner.

Many are the good stories told of His Royal Highness and his habit (like Lord Dudley’s) of “thinking aloud,” particularly in church—such as his audible remark, when the parson had uttered the words “Let us pray,” of “By all means;” his “No, no, I don’t mind tithes, but can’t stand half,” when the clergyman had read the text as to the expediency of giving half of one’s possessions to the poor; and his common-sense view of the non-efficacy of a certain prayer for rain: “No good—shan’t get rain while the wind’s in this quarter;” and so on.

On his death in 1850, the Duke was succeeded in the occupancy of the house by a man who was also the hero of many excellent “mots”—Lord Palmerston.

“The frolicsome statesman, the man of the day

A laughing philosopher, gallant and gay,”

as Locker-Lampson called him. It is said that much of Palmerston’s popularity was due to the splendid functions which took place under Lady Palmerston’s auspices in this fine mansion. At his death there was some idea of pulling down the house to make room for a Roman Catholic Cathedral, but happily the scheme fell to the ground, and the place is, with some additions necessary to the club which occupies it, in practically the same state as when the royal Duke thought aloud in its chambers, or the Prime Minister nonchalantly sauntered through its gates.

OTHER PICCADILLY CLUBS.

Passing the Junior Naval and Military Club at No. 96, the Badminton at No. 100, and the massive buildings of the Junior Constitutional, representing Nos. 101 to 104, Piccadilly, we come to a beautiful house, now the home of the Isthmian Club, which removed here from its premises opposite Berkeley Street, now absorbed by the magnificent Ritz Hotel.

This residence, No. 95, was originally known as Barrymore House, having been built in 1780, by Novosielski, for the Earl of Barrymore, on a site once occupied by the workshop of that Van Nost, who was responsible for the statue of George I. formerly in Grosvenor Square. Lord Barrymore was the eldest of those three brothers and one sister, who earned for themselves the unflattering sobriquets of Hellgate, Cripplegate, Newgate, and Billingsgate—the second being in allusion to one of the brothers who was lame, and the last, to the sister whose command of strong language was “extensive and peculiar.” Gambling and general profligacy—by the way “profligate” might have summed up the whole family—brought Lord Barrymore to great distress, and Raikes records in his Diary that when the peer wished to give a dinner, he had perforce—à la Dick Steele—to dress up the bailiffs, who were perpetually in the house, in his own liveries and get them to wait at table!

It is hardly surprising to learn that the house was left unfinished at the death of this unsavoury personage, and subsequently Smirke added the porch. After a fire had occurred here—the curious thing being that it did not happen in Barrymore’s lifetime—the place was repaired and opened as the “Old Pulteney Hotel,” and here it was that the Emperor of Russia stayed, when the allied Sovereigns were in this country in 1814.

After its day as an hotel, the Marquis of Hertford purchased the house, and greatly improved, but practically never occupied it. This was the third Lord Hertford, who married that Maria Fagniani, about whose paternity George Selwyn and Old Q. could never satisfactorily agree, and who is so largely responsible for the magnificent art collection which Sir Richard Wallace left to the nation.

Next door, divided by a narrow passage, is No. 106, which is now known as the “St. James’s Club.” Built on the site of an old inn called “The Greyhound,” by the sixth Earl of Coventry, “the grave young lord,” as Walpole calls him—who, by the bye, married one of the beautiful Gunnings, who killed herself, ’tis said, by trying to improve the loveliness that Nature had given her. Here he died in 1809; his successor to the title also lived here, and, after his decease in 1831, it became the headquarters of the “Coventry House Club” (or the “Ambassadors’”), which was, however, closed in 1854. The house next door is also a club—“The Savile”—one of the literary clubs of modern London. In the old days, it was the home of the famous Nathan Rothschild, who made a great coup over the Battle of Waterloo, and once told Spohr that the only music he cared for was the chink of money!

As we loiter along, the trees of the Green Park attract us, and the gradual widening of the thoroughfare as we approach Hyde Park Corner, an improvement made but a few years since, gives an additional effect to the coup d’œil that here presents itself. That curious object over there, a sort of high shelf standing on two iron supports, has exercised many a mind as to its uses. Perhaps not many people are aware that the solution is to be found on a plate affixed to the object itself, the words of which are as follows: “On the suggestion of R. A. Slaney, Esq., who for 26 years represented Shrewsbury in Parliament, this porters’ rest was erected in 1861 by the Vestry of St. George, Hanover Square, for the benefit of porters and others carrying burdens. As a relic of a past period in London’s history it is hoped that the people will aid in its preservation.” But we must return to our bricks and mortar and the associations connected with them.

DOWN STREET.

Now we are at the corner of Down Street, which leads directly to Mayfair; and here (in No. 116, Piccadilly) is now the Junior Athenæum Club, but known in earlier days as Hope House, which H. T. Hope, the author of “Anastasius” and the creator of “Deepdene,” at Dorking—built in 1848-9, at a cost of £80,000.

When a stranger is brought to this point and shewn the narrow way dividing the club from the adjoining houses, and is told that it is Park Lane (see page 134) he probably, being ignorant of locality, receives a shock, having in mind the celebrity of this part of the town and the fine houses which he has been taught to believe exist in it. But this narrow street is technically the commencement of Park Lane, and does much to account for the somewhat inappropriate title by which this fashionable thoroughfare is known.

The tenuity of this connecting neck, between Piccadilly and Park Lane proper (if I may so term it), is still more accentuated by the huge block of flats now being erected on the site of Gloucester House, until recently the well-known residence of the late Duke of Cambridge. Formerly this was the town house of that Lord Elgin who is famous as having acquired the marvellous collection of antique marbles over which poor Haydon was so enthusiastic, and here these treasures of antiquity were for a time to be seen. The house took its name from the Duke of Gloucester, who bought it in 1816, when he married his cousin the Princess Mary, one of the many children of George III.

THE GATES OF HYDE PARK IN 1756.
(From a Drawing by Jones.)

When Gloucester House was still in existence the two adjoining mansions, Nos. 138 and 139, stood out in the glory of their stone façades, from the old brick house which receded somewhat from the road, but now they in their turn threaten to become dwarfed by the huge erection which towers above them.

These two houses were originally one, and here lived that “wicked old Q.”—the Duke of Queensberry, whose manner of life was so notorious. Here the old profligate sat under a sunshade in fine weather to ogle the girls who passed by, and to send by his groom Radford, many an impertinent message to the more attractive of them. Here this “Star of Piccadilly” on one occasion, while engaging a running footman (he was one of the last to keep this former appendage to noble state), made the man put on his livery and run up and down in front of the house, and finding him suitable, told him so, when the rogue replied, “and your livery will suit me,” and making a mock bow, bolted, and was seen no more!

It may be well, as we are now at the end of Piccadilly proper (for, although the houses on the other side of Hamilton Place, among which is that famous “No. 1, London,” as someone once called Apsley House, where the great Wellington lived, and put up the celebrated iron shutters, now removed, are given in Directories as in Piccadilly, they should more properly be considered as at Hyde Park Corner), to end our perambulation at the house of one who was so pre-eminently a Londoner as “Old Q.” I wish we could have done so in better company, and inasmuch as Lord Byron once resided at No. 139, then called, “13, Piccadilly Terrace,” we do so, for although his lordship, apart from his remarkable genius, was not a pattern of morality, he compares well with the nobleman whose only redeeming merits were that he was no fool and loved London as he probably loved few things. When in town once in September, a friend asked Lord Queensberry if he did not find it empty. “Yes,” he replied, “but ’tis fuller than the country;” and there is little doubt but that even in those early days, no place could have been selected for anyone to better enjoy the life of London than that spot where the tide of humanity met, at the junction of Piccadilly and Park Lane, with almost as full a force as we have seen it do at the corner of Piccadilly and Old Bond Street, where Stewart’s, hoary with antiquity (but to-day one of the most artistic buildings in the neighbourhood), stands, and where those keenest judges in the world—our American cousins—love to foregather, on the spot that is perhaps better known to them than any other in London.

The Piccadilly Turnpike, which is such a feature in contemporary prints of this part of the West End, was removed in 1721 from the end of Berkeley Street to Hyde Park Corner. It remained here till 1825, in October of which year it was sold and removed.

THE TURNPIKE AT HYDE PARK CORNER, 1706.

CHAPTER II.

ST. JAMES’S STREET AND PALL MALL.

“O bear me to the paths of fair Pall Mall,

Safe are thy pavements, grateful is thy smell.”

—Gay’s “Trivia.”

Can we do better, after the surfeit of bricks and mortar which we have just undergone, than relax our jaded senses and relieve our wearied eyes by loitering for a few moments in the Green Park? See! it is just across the way, and a convenient entrance helps to tempt our steps. It is not extensive, but it is an oasis that many a Londoner—besides Lord Beaconsfield, who loved to wander there, when he had one of his rare opportunities—will seek with eagerness and enjoy with a thankful heart.

THE GREEN PARK.

When Piccadilly was “the way to Redinge,” and before Buckingham House—the red-brick precursor of the present Palace—had risen on the site of Tart Hall, the site of the Green Park was waste land, with here and there a little ditch, and here and there a willow; and yet it has had “its scenes, its joys and crimes,” in common with every square foot of ground in the metropolis. We may be sure it felt the tread of armed men in 1554, when Wyatt’s rebellion threatened to upset the throne of “bloody Mary”; and a century later, in 1643 to be precise, cannot we in imagination see the crowd of men, women, and children streaming across it to give a helping hand in the formation of those fortifications which were to prevent a king from entering his capital? As to its crimes, it is certain that there were plenty of those committed when the guardianship of the peace was a very different thing from what we pampered mortals are accustomed to consider it. Why, the duels alone that were fought here would make matter for a good-sized chapter. Beau Fielding fights Sir Henry Colt, in 1696, and, they say, runs him through the body before he has time to draw his sword, but, nevertheless, gets disarmed himself; and “That thing of silk, Sporus,” as I have already indicated, meets William Pulteney here, some thirty years later, what time the Park had become so favourite a place for such encounters that it is specifically mentioned as “a rendezvous for duels,” in a guide to London of the period.

Had Queen Caroline—that clever woman who managed George II. and ruled the kingdom with Walpole—had her way, a royal residence might now be actually in the Park. She did build a library here, practically where Stafford House now stands, but that is as far as she went. Her royal husband, who, with his many faults, was a brave man, and knew how to fight—and on foot, too, as he did at Dettingen—liked reviews of all things, and used to have his troops manœuvring about in the Park on all sorts of occasions. One such review is mentioned in 1747, when “the regiment (Sir Robert Rich’s Dragoons) made a very fine appearance, and his Majesty was greatly pleased with them,” we are told. The Duke of Cumberland’s Dragoons, which distinguished themselves, or otherwise, according to the Stuart or Hanoverian sympathies of the time, in “the ’45,” were out, for the same picturesque reason, some days later. Then there was that great celebration for the conclusion of the War of Succession, when a huge temple was erected, and fireworks blazed to the accompaniment of a military overture written by the illustrious Handel himself.

Sir Robert Peel wanted to transform the Park into something analogous to what we have seen occurring to the Mall, but surely with less happy results; one of its very charms lies in the fact that in the midst of Urbanism (to coin a word) it remains rustic, in the very centre of conventionalism it is unconventional. The great minister, when advocating such an alteration, could little have supposed that his death would be so closely connected with this spot; but here it was that, riding down Constitution Hill yonder, his horse threw him, on June 29th, 1850, and three days later he was no more.

CONSTITUTION HILL.

This Constitution Hill, about the origin of which name no good explanation is forthcoming, was in Strype’s day known simply as the “Road to Kensington,” as may be seen on his plan dated 1720.

Here it was that Charles II. was walking towards Hyde Park when—according to Dr. King’s well-known anecdote—he met the Duke of York in his coach, just as he was about to cross Hyde Park Corner. The Duke, on being informed that his Majesty was walking, immediately alighted, and going up to the King told him he was surprised to find him on foot and with so few attendants; intimating that Charles was exposing himself to some danger. “No kind of danger, James,” replied the Merry Monarch, “for I am sure no man will kill me to make you king.” But the road has not always been so safe for kingly heads, for here, it will be remembered, the lunatic Oxford shot at Queen Victoria, as she was driving, on June 10th, 1840.

The wall of Buckingham Palace grounds runs the entire length of Constitution Hill, to which additional width is just being given, and as we wend our steps across the Park, at an angle, towards the little paved way that leads by Stafford House, we can see the commencement of that great memorial which will perpetuate in stone, as they are enshrined in the hearts of the people, the virtuous life and great qualities of Queen Victoria.

Stafford House lies in front of us, to the right. A wondrous pile, it was originally built for that Duke of York whose effigy stands on the top of the great pillar in Carlton House Terrace. Although glorious within, externally—except from its size—it is not imposing, and its plainness gives point to the remark of some wit of the period that it looked like a packing-case out of which Bridgewater House, the graceful building on our left, had been taken.

When Fielding, as we have seen, fought with Colt, he did so in sight of the windows of Cleveland House, which originally stood close by, the ground having been given by Charles II. to that Duchess of Cleveland who caused him so much trouble, and who had a partiality for the Beau who fought beneath her windows.

CLEVELAND ROW.

Cleveland Row takes its name from old Cleveland House, and forms the south side of that most curious of “quadrates,” Cleveland Square.

Theodore Hook once lived in the Row, at No. 5; so did Lord Rodney and Sir Sidney Smith; Thomas Grenville, of bibliophilic fame; and Lord Stowell, the great lawyer, and brother of Lord Eldon. George Selwyn died at what was then called, 1, Cleveland Court, in 1791; and Mason, the poet, was residing here at a “Mr. Mennis’s” four and twenty years earlier. Walpole and Townshend had their memorable quarrel, parodied by Grey in his “Beggar’s Opera,” in a room in one of the houses; while Lord Bute, in 1761, moved a portion of the Foreign Office hither from its former locale in the Cockpit at Westminster.

ST. JAMES’S PLACE.

The houses that adjoin Bridgewater House to the north are those of which the entrances are in St. James’s Place and Arlington Street. The most architecturally noticeable is the first we see, Spencer House, in the making of which, the talent of John Vardy, James Stuart, and M. H. Spong was combined. A little further on is the house in which the poet Rogers lived and gave those breakfasts and dinners which have become historic. The contents were so carefully selected and so rich, as treasures of art or literature, that Byron used to say there was not a single object which did “not bespeak an almost fastidious elegance in the possessor;” and Moore, and Macaulay, and Burney, and a hundred others who were guests here, have left confirmatory praise. Here it was that Byron, invited to meet Moore and Campbell (what a constellation!) would eat nothing but potatoes mashed up in vinegar, and then, ’tis said, went off later to a club in St. James’s Street and made a hearty supper off beefsteaks! Here Chantry, the great sculptor, told his host that it was he who, in the days of his probation as a working carpenter, had made a certain piece of furniture in the dining room; but there would be no end to the recollections clustering about this house if I did not place a curb on my pen. Other poets have lived in St. James’s Place—Addison and Parnell, besides many another well-known personality; Molly Lepel, and Sir John Cope; Secretary Craggs, and Charles James Fox; “Perdita” Robinson, and Sir Francis Burdett; Wilkes, the noisy demagogue, and Warren Hastings, the great pro-consul.

ARLINGTON STREET.

Arlington Street is hardly less interesting. There is the home of the Cecils, where one great Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, could once look across the street at the windows of the house that had sheltered another—Sir Robert Walpole. As the son of the latter once wrote to Montagu: “Nothing can be more dignified than this position.” In the past, as in the present, its houses have been the homes of the illustrious. The street was formed in 1689, and was the property of that Arlington who was one of the “A’s” of the famous (or, shall we say, infamous?) “Cabal.” The Duchess of Cleveland withdrew hither, after the death of Charles had made Cleveland House too costly an abode; the Duchess of Buckingham, wife of that Duke, castigated in Dryden’s best-known lines, and daughter of Fairfax, Cromwell’s henchman; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who resided here with her father, the Duke of Kingston; Pulteney, Earl of Bath—as if he could never get away from his enemy, Sir Robert; and Henry Pelham, who lived at No. 17, in the house built by Kent and now Lord Yarborough’s. At No. 21 Lord Sefton gave his famous dinners with Ude as chef in command; and Lord Wimborne’s house, which is already dwarfed by the neighbouring “Ritz,” once belonged to Lord Camden, then to the Duke of Beaufort, and was subsequently sold to the Duke of Hamilton for £60,000; while John Lothrop Motley was renting Lord Yarborough’s house, from 1869-70, during his term of office as United States Minister.

If we turn back into St. James’s Street and look down that famous thoroughfare two things cannot fail to strike us—one, the effective screen at the bottom formed by the picturesque clock-tower of the Palace which dates from Henry VIII.’s time; the other, the marked declivity in the ground, which is only comparable with Ludgate Hill, in the East, and is considerably steeper than any part of Piccadilly or Knightsbridge, in the West.

ST. JAMES’S STREET.

St. James’s Street is a street of memories, if ever there was one in London; to mention all the interesting people who have lodged in it would make a very fair chapter; to record even the bare outlines of the history of its clubs and coffee-houses would form another. Appropriately is it named “St. James’s Street,” for it is pre-eminently the thoroughfare of this aristocratic quarter. Here may still be seen one or two old shops that recall Georgian days, although the street is undergoing such a metamorphosis of rebuilding that one never knows but that some fine morning their familiar fronts may have disappeared; here survive some of the most exclusive and best known of the Clubs which are the particular characteristic of this quarter; and the unchanged front of the Palace at the lower end is such a dominating note in the picture, that, looking down the street, when one of those mists so beloved of Whistler give atmospheric mystery to the thoroughfare, we may almost expect to see Charles II. sauntering through its portals with Rochester or Sedley; or George II. driving through its gates on his way to Kensington Palace or Richmond Park.

The history of

“The dear old street of clubs and cribs,

As north and south it stretches,”

is one which, if its record were fully written, would be found to have no little connection with the annals of the country. Its position, its proximity to the Palace, its past inhabitants, its famous club houses (where so much of the history of the country was, and is, evolved,) all make for its claim in this respect.

WHITE’S CLUB.

On our left is the famous bow window of “White’s,” where the dandies used to assemble to quiz the ladies on their way to the drawing-rooms. What a history has that club! It has been written, and fills two large volumes, and the “betting book” is a sight for gods and men—if not for young men and maidens. In the old days they used to bet on anything and everything, and there is the story of the man who fell down in a fit, outside the club windows, and wagers being immediately laid as to whether he was dead or not, certain interested members solemnly objected to means being taken to revive the unhappy individual—as it would have affected the validity of the bets laid!

White’s Club. JAMES’S STREET IN THE REIGN OF GEORGE III Brooks’s Club.

It was by giving his arm to one then unknown to fame, from the bottom of the street to the door of White’s, that Brummell considered he had rendered a very important service to a young man, and as it were, given him a splendid set-off in life!

The origin of the club, for which, it will be remembered, Horace Walpole once designed a coat of arms, was White’s Chocolate House, which was established in 1698, just ten years after Stewart’s Bakery, as we have seen, opened its doors at the corner of Bond Street. White’s was then on the west side of St. James’s Street, five doors from the bottom, and occupied the one-time residence of that Countess of Northumberland, who was such a “grande dame,” that her grand-daughter-in-law, the Duchess of Somerset, is reported to have never sat down in her presence without previously asking her leave. It soon became a hot-bed of aristocratic gamesters. Robert Harley never passed by without cursing it, as the bane of half the nobility; Whitehead, in one of his poems, does not hesitate to call it a den of thieves; and although Chesterfield once wrote to his son that “a member of a gaming club should be a cheat or he will soon be a beggar,” that teacher of manners and morals practically lived at White’s, not putting in practice, it is to be hoped, what he taught by precept.

The Club was burnt down in 1733; but, phœnix-like, sprang up again soon after, at Gaunt’s Coffee House, which was next door to the St. James’s Coffee House near the south-west corner of the street. Arthur, Mackreth, Martindale, and Raggett, all names familiar to students of the social life of the eighteenth century, were the successive proprietors of White’s, after 1736, when the Chocolate House was formed into a regular club. Nineteen years after that date it was removed to the premises it now occupies and its present outward appearance is due to alterations made nearly a century later.

BOODLE’S CLUB.

Boodle’s, another famous club, is almost opposite, at No. 28, and was known formerly, from its gastronomic reputation, as the “Savoir Vivre.” The Club House was designed by Adam for John Crunden, in 1765, and additions were made to it in 1821. It was largely frequented by country gentlemen, who knew probably how hard it was “to rival Boodle’s dinners,” and it used to be said, in consequence, that if a waiter came into the reading-room and called out, “Sir John, your servant has come,” every other head was mechanically turned in answer to the summons! Both Gibbon and Wilberforce were members, as was that Sir Frank Standish, caricatured by Gillray as “A Standing Dish at Boodle’s.” Gillray, by the bye, lived next door, at No. 29, where, in 1815, he committed suicide by throwing himself from an upper window.

CROCKFORD’S CLUB.

Opposite “White’s” is the Devonshire Club, which occupies the site of the famous Crockford’s, probably the most notorious gaming house of its day. It took its name from one Crockford, who had been a fish salesman in the City, but, coming to the West, made an immense fortune here. The house was built for him, in 1827, from the designs of the Wyatts. The internal decorations were so lavish that the ubiquitous Creevey describes the place as “magnificent, and perfect in taste and beauty,” and adds that “it is said by those who know the Palace of Versailles, to be even more magnificent than that,” which certainly sounds like thundering hyperbole! The great “Ude” catered for the palates of Crockford’s habitués, and there is a story told of the illustrious chef, during his connection with the club, to the following effect:—Colonel Damer happening to enter Crockford’s one evening to dine early, found Ude in a towering rage, and asking the cause, was thus answered by the infuriated cordon bleu:—“Monsieur le Colonel, did you see that man who has just gone out? Well, he ordered a red mullet for his dinner. I made him a delicious little sauce with my own hands. The price of the mullet marked on the carte was 2s.; I asked 6d. for the sauce. He refuses to pay the 6d. The imbecile apparently believes that the red mullets come out of the sea with my sauce in their pockets!” Of such are the woes of genius! It was Ude, too, who, on hearing of the last illness of his former patron the Duke of York, exclaimed, “Ah! Mon pauvre Duc, how much you shall miss me where you are gone!”

Wellington was a member of Crockford’s, though he never played deeply; so was Theodore Hook, who, because his doctor had once warned him against exposing himself to the night air, had the following method of abiding by the medico’s instructions:—“I therefore,” he said, “come up every day to Crockford’s, or some other place to dinner, and I make it a rule on no account to go home again till about four or five o’clock in the morning!”

BROOKS’S CLUB.

Another famous Club in St. James’s Street, was Brooks’s, which was nearly opposite the original White’s. Like so many of these clubs it took its name from a former proprietor, although it was at first merely a gaming club, formed by Almack.

Brooks, whom Tickell immortalises (if he could immortalise anything) as

“Liberal Brooks, whose speculative skill,

Is hasty credit, and a distant bill,”

removed the club from its quarters in Pall Mall to its present position, and opened it in 1778, but, unlike Crockford, he does not appear to have made a fortune out of the concern.

The members included such great ones as Reynolds and Burke and Garrick, Hume and Gibbon, Horace Walpole, Sheridan, and Wilberforce. The latter has recorded his first appearance here, thus: “Hardly knowing anyone, I joined, from mere shyness, in play at the faro table, where George Selwyn kept bank. A friend, who knew my inexperience and regarded me as a victim decked out for sacrifice, called to me, ‘What, Wilberforce, is that you?’ Selwyn quite resented the interference, and, turning to him, said, in his most expressive tone, ‘Oh, sir, don’t interrupt Mr. Wilberforce; he could not be better employed.’”

Apropos of Gibbons’ membership of Brooks’s, a curious memento should still be among the treasures of some lucky bibliophile, for, when Fox’s effects were sold, at his death, in 1806, there was included among them the first volume of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” presented by the writer to the great statesman who had written the following words on one of the blank leaves:—

“The author, at Brooks’s, said there was no salvation for this country until six heads of the principal persons in administration were laid upon the table. Eleven days after, this same gentleman accepted a place of lord of trade under those very Ministers, and has acted with them ever since!”

There are no end to the anecdotes connected with Brooks’s, and the famous or notorious people with whom they are connected. Here is Roger Wilbraham, what time honours were in the air, asking Sir Philip Francis, an absorbed player, what he thought they would give him; and the irate gamester, suddenly turning round and roaring out, “A halter, and be d——d to you!”; here, it is said, the Prince of Wales was a party to the hoax by which Sheridan got elected in the very teeth of the redoubtable Selwyn; here, at a later date, the brewer, Alderman Combe, losing heavily to Brummell who patronisingly said he would never in future drink any porter but his opponent’s, retorted with “I wish every other blackguard would tell me the same;” and here is the Duke of Devonshire partaking of that broiled bladebone of mutton for which he had such a passion, and which was regularly prepared for him at the club!

OTHER ST. JAMES’S STREET CLUBS.

Many other clubs which to-day are to be found in this street, are descendants of earlier institutions, while some have taken the place of older ones; among the latter may be named the Devonshire, and the New University, with its noticeable buildings which Waterhouse designed: the former are distinguished by their names alone; the “Cocoa Tree,” the “Thatched House,” and “Arthur’s.” Built in 1825, on the site of the original Chocolate House, “Arthur’s” took its name from that Arthur whose son-in-law, Mackreth, eventually succeeded to its ownership.

It will be remembered that it was on the occasion of one of the waiters here being convicted on a charge of robbery, that Selwyn remarked: “What a horrid idea he will give of us to the people in Newgate.” The Thatched House Club, which grew out of the “Thatched House,” where the Dilettanti Society and innumerable other fraternities were wont to foregather, does not stand on the site of the original clubhouse, which was till recently occupied by the Civil Service Club at the corner of King Street; but the name was formerly preserved in “Thatched House Court,” which has long since passed away.

ST. JAMES’S STREET CHOCOLATE HOUSES.

Just as the St. James’s Chocolate House was the resort of the Whigs in the Augustan age so the Tory headquarters were at the “Cocoa Tree,” which was metamorphosed into a club some time in George II.’s reign, and was then noted for high play. There is extant the story of one O’Birne, an Irish gamester, who had won a round £100,000 at the Cocoa Tree from a young man named Harvey. “You can never pay me,” said the Irishman. “I can,” replied Harvey, “my estate will sell for the debt.” “No,” said O’Birne, “I will win ten thousand—you shall throw for the odd ninety,” which, being done, Harvey, who would seem to have hardly deserved his luck, won! Gibbon, and later Byron, belonged to this club, and this reminds me that it was while lodging in St. James’s Street that the latter awoke one morning and found himself famous. An extraordinary medallion portrait under glass commemorates the house (No. 8) in which the author of “Childe Harold” lodged, and it was from here that he set forth to deliver his maiden, and only speech in the House of Lords.

Among other interesting residents of St. James’s Street was Charles James Fox; and here Walpole saw his furniture being carried off to satisfy his horde of creditors. To hark back, we find Waller in a house on the west side, and Lord Brouncker, the first President of the Royal Society, living here; Pope at “my lodgings at Mr. Digby’s, next door to ye Golden Bell, on ye second Terras in St. James’s Street;” Wolfe, who wrote from here in 1758 to Pitt, desiring employment in America; and Gibbon, who died 26 years later, at No. 76, now part of the Conservative Club.

It was in this street that Dr. Johnson once did some shopping with Boswell; calling at Wirgman’s toy-shop (at No. 69, where Arthur’s is now) “to choose a pair of silver buckles, as those he had were too small.”

KING STREET.

King Street, through which we can see the trees of St. James’s Square, must not delay us, or we shall never get along, but we may remember that from 1673, when it was formed, to 1830, it was not a street proper at all, but merely one of those exiguous courts, of which Crown Court, in Pall Mall, is a survivor. There is one private house of interest in King Street, for at No. 1c, as a memorial tablet commemorates, Napoleon III., while yet only Prince Louis Napoleon, resided for two years, 1838-40, after he had been expelled from Switzerland. While living here he was enrolled as a special constable during the Chartist riots; and while here he also took part in that famous Eglinton Tournament which required nothing to make it successful but fine weather. It was from King Street that the future Emperor started on his unsuccessful descent on Boulogne, when it is said that he procured a tame eagle from Covent Garden as a sort of political property, which was to be released on his stepping on to French soil—a piece of theatrical legerdemain that cost him the adherence of at least one follower. I may remind the stranger that the famous Willis’s Rooms, formerly Almack’s, that “Matrimonial Bazaar,” as Lord William Pitt Lennox calls it, the laws of which were as those of the Medes and Persians, as the great Duke of Wellington once had reason to remember when he was turned away from its doors, are still in King Street, but turned to other uses, and that just opposite stands the equally famous “Christie’s,” where old and new masters are continually changing hands.

As we turn into Pall Mall, the picturesque buildings of St. James’s Palace tempt us to loiter; but that is a subject which once entered upon in this little book would lead me into an endless maze of historical and topographical data, and we must unwillingly pass by.

PALL MALL.

Here we are in the very heart of Clubland; indeed, so long ago as 1849, when J. T. Smith wrote his fascinating book on the Streets of London, he speaks of this noble street as bidding fair to contain in a short time nothing but club-palaces, as he very properly terms them; and to-day (as Thackeray wrote): “Extending down the street palace after palace rises magnificent, and under their lofty roofs warriors and lawyers, merchants and nobles, scholars and seamen, the wealthy, the poor, the busy, the idle assemble.”

Sᵗ. James’s Palace, view’d from Pall Mall.

The Same from the Park.

THE CARLTON AND REFORM CLUBS.

Here are the two great political headquarters—the Carlton, founded by the Duke of Wellington and some of his supporters, and built, so far as its premises here are concerned (for it was originally housed in Charles Street close by), in 1836, from the designs of Smirke; and the Reform, which, as its name implies, was started to help the cause of the great Reform Bill, in 1830. The present beautiful buildings of the latter club were the work of Barry, and carry us in imagination to that Farnese Palace at Rome from which some features in its construction were borrowed. The kitchens, as important adjuncts to a club as they are to a college, were designed by the great Alexis Soyer. Among the great successes of this admirable genius (who, by the bye, had been, in turn, chef to Prince George of Cambridge, Lord Ailsa, and Lord Panmure), was the great banquet held on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Coronation, and the dinner given to Lord Palmerston, in 1850. In the latter case a gastronomic triumph was particularly appropriate, for “Pam” liked a good dinner as much as any man, and, indeed, an opponent once had to confess that “Lord Palmerston is redeemed from the last extremity of political degradation by his cook!”

THE JUNIOR CARLTON CLUB.

Another great club in Pall Mall, the Junior Carlton, is an off-shoot of the Carlton. Formed in 1864, and originally located at No. 14, Regent Street, the club moved to its present quarters in 1867, when several small houses in St. James’s Square and Pall Mall having been pulled down, it arose on their site under the architectural wand of Brandon. Some 20 years later, Adair House was demolished and the club enlarged. Opposite the Junior Carlton, on the same side of Pall Mall (the tiny George Street intervening), is the Army and Navy Club, which has its chief front in the Square. The building was erected by Parnell and Smith, in 1848-51, and is modelled on the Palazzo Cornaro at Venice.

OTHER PALL MALL CLUBS.

Across the way, and next to the Reform, is the unpretentious front of the Travellers’ Club, the idea of which originated with Lord Castlereagh about the year 1814. Barry built the present house in 1832. In view of its name, it is interesting to know that one of its rules ordains that no one is eligible as a member “who shall not have travelled out of the British Islands to a distance of at least 500 miles from London in a direct line.” When that rule was formed travelling was a very different business from what it is to-day, for now one can hardly overcome the results of a London season without going this distance, and many people find it necessary to go twice as far to keep their minds occupied and their livers in order.

Talleyrand was an habitué of the Travellers’, and it was here that he made his well-known reply to someone who wondered how a certain great lady could, at her age, have married, as she had done, a valet de chambre: “It was late in the game” replied Talleyrand, who was playing whist at the time. “At nine we don’t reckon honours.”

The Athenæum, at the corner of Waterloo Place, built in 1829, is a very learned club, and appropriately has the finest club library in London. Its premises, which are thoroughly classic, were designed by Decimus Burton. It had been instituted five years previously by, among others, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Wilson Croker, Sir Humphrey Davy, and that Jekyll, whom George IV., when Prince of Wales, insisted on Eldon’s making a Master in Chancery. I will not again inflict the well-known anecdote on long-suffering readers; but I may remind them that on one occasion the hospitality of the Junior Army and Navy, on the other side of Waterloo Place, was, during some cleaning process, extended to the members of the Athenæum, many of whom graced the church, and that soon after, the umbrella of one of the service members mysteriously disappeared; whereupon the irate soldier exclaimed, “Exactly, I knew what it would be when we agreed to allow those d——d bishops to come to our shop!”

Talking of shops reminds me that Hoby’s, the celebrated bootmaker’s, was, till quite recently, opposite, at the corner of John Street—the shortest thoroughfare, by the bye, in London. The original Hoby was a great character, and said what he liked to his customers, who were legion, and frequently illustrious. He made the Duke of Wellington’s boots, and always attributed the successes of that great leader to this fact, and also, parenthetically, to the prayers which he used to offer up on his behalf!

Two examples of Hoby’s way of talking to his clientèle are extant; one, when Ensign Churchill complained of some boots made to his order, and Hoby, putting on a mock serious face, turned to an assistant and told him to put up the shutters, as if the Ensign’s custom was withdrawn, there was an end of the business; the other, when a nobleman complained of his riding boots being uncomfortable when he walked, whereupon Hoby told him that he had made the boots for riding not for walking.

As we are wandering about Pall Mall in a somewhat desultory manner, I make no excuse for turning back from the Athenæum to the large building near by, which up to quite recently, formed an inadequate home for the War Office. That part of it which has a small courtyard in front, in which stood the graceful statue of Sidney Herbert, was rebuilt for the use of the Secretary of State for War; but the most interesting portion is that known as Schomberg House, which was erected in 1650, at the time when Pall Mall was planted with elm trees. It took its name from that Duke of Schomberg who was killed at the Battle of the Boyne, and was much improved by the third and last Duke; but its chief claim to notice lies in the fact that Gainsborough (as Cosway had done before him) lived the last years of his life here, and expired in the second floor room (which is now indicated by a tablet), in 1788, with the well-known exclamation on his lips: “We are all going to heaven, and Vandyck is of the company.”

The house next door (to the west), now the Eagle Insurance Office, is interesting from the fact that it stands on the one-time residence of Nell Gwyn, the gardens of which stretched to the Mall, and here took place that “familiar discourse between the King and Mrs. Nellie, as they call an impudent comedian, she looking out of her garden on a terrace, at the top of the wall, and the King standing on the green walk under it,” which Evelyn has thus recorded, and E. M. Ward, R.A., perpetuated on canvas. This site is the only freehold in Pall Mall, and the story goes that on Charles giving “Mrs. Nellie” a lease of the place, she took the parchment and threw it in his face, intimating at the same time that nothing short of “freehold tenure” was good enough for her.

The two adjoining houses have been, not long since, converted into one, and now form the London residence of T.R.H. the Prince and Princess Christian.

When the great “Sarah of Marlborough” was amazed by, as she called them, her neighbour George’s “orange chests,” she was in residence at the large red brick house, faced with stone, which a grateful nation had presented to her husband (although the Duchess always said it cost him £40,000 to £50,000 out of his own pocket), and which had been erected in 1709, on part of the pheasantry of St. James’s Park, which had been leased by Queen Anne to her old favourite. Here the great Duke, “with the tears of dotage” flowing from his eyes, expired in 1722, and one of the great sights of Pall Mall must have been that almost regal funeral which the Duchess arranged herself, and in which figured that funeral-car which she refused at a later date to lend to the Duchess of Buckingham, because, as she said, no one was worthy to be carried on what had borne the illustrious victor of Blenheim! Some fifty years after her husband’s death, the indomitable old “Sarah,” at the age of 84, was told that she must be blistered or she would die, to which she replied in angry tones, “I won’t be blistered and I won’t die.” She died in the year 1774.

Marlborough House was subsequently purchased (in 1817) by the Crown, as a residence for the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold; and here, after the death of the Princess, the widower lived for some years; so did Queen Adelaide after the decease of William IV., and in 1850, the house was settled on the Prince of Wales (now His Majesty the King); but before he occupied it, its lower apartments had been used for various art exhibitions. The entrance is anything but imposing, and is rendered still more insignificant by the high buildings of the Junior Oxford and Cambridge Club next door, adjoining which are the Guards’ Club and the imposing front of the Oxford and Cambridge itself, the latter of which was built by Smirke in 1836.

On the north side of Pall Mall we get a glimpse of an almost Georgian perspective if we look up the narrow Crown Court, and can for the moment forget its new front and the adjoining elaborate buildings which have been recently erected facing Marlborough House. This Court is one of the few survivors of many, and is shewn on old plans, which, on the other hand, do not give Pall Mall Place (of later construction), a little further east, which passes under one of the windows of No. 51, once the famous headquarters of Dodsley, the publisher. This house then rejoiced in that sign of “Tully’s Head,” appearing on the titles of so many of the best-known works of the eighteenth century which the great Dodsley ushered into the world.

PALL MALL TAVERNS.

Pall Mall has been in the past—for you shall seek long enough for them now—noted for its taverns. There was, for instance, the “Queen’s Arms,” where the sanguinary duel between the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun was planned; and the “Star and Garter” (the descendant of which has but recently disappeared), where Lord Byron killed Mr. Chaworth in 1765, and where the first Cricket Club is said to have been founded in 1774, by Sir Horace Mann (a Kent cricketer and Walpole’s correspondent), the Duke of Dorset, and Lord Tankerville, of the Surrey and Hants eleven, and others.

Then there was “Wood’s at the Pell Mell” mentioned by Pepys, where, in 1662, Mr. Jermyn and Captain Howard fought a duel; and the “Sugar Loaf,” the “Golden Pestle and Mortar,” the “Golden Door,” and the “Barber’s Pole”—to mention but these—were signs that might previously have been seen here. The Coffee Houses numbered among them the well-known “Smyrna” of early Georgian days, and the “King’s Arms,” where the “Liberty” or “Rumpsteak Club” met and concerted measures against Sir Robert Walpole.

It was in Pall Mall, near the bottom of the Haymarket, that Thynne was murdered at the instigation of Konigsmarck—a brutal deed which may still be seen commemorated on the tomb of the victim in Westminster Abbey; here, too, the mail from France was robbed at half-past eight on January 7th, 1786, almost in the very faces of the Palace Guard, as Walpole relates with natural astonishment; and here the Gordon Rioters were with difficulty prevented from destroying that Schomberg House we have but recently been gazing at.

If great people have left their mark on the street, some curious individualities have also been connected with it. Think of four women racing down Pall Mall for a prize, to wit, “a holland smock, a cap, checked stockings, and laced shoes!” Yet this is what was witnessed here in the year of grace 1733. This appears to have been permitted by the long-suffering authorities, but when one of the residents offered “a laced hat” to be run for by five men, so great a disturbance was created that the magistrates intervened.

During the earlier years of Charles II.’s reign, when Catherine of Braganza came over to share his throne, if nothing else, streets were named with some profusion after that ill-treated lady; thus, as Piccadilly was then converted into Portugal Street, so, for a time at least, Pall Mall was known as Catherine Street. Its former, and present better-known denomination is derived, as all the world is aware, from the game of Pall Mall or Paille-Maille—from Palla, a ball, and maglia, a mallet—a game somewhat analogous to our croquet, which was once played in the “Mall” close by.

CARLTON HOUSE.

Although its name is redolent of Carolean times, it is probable that few streets have been so altered in outward appearance as Pall Mall. The chief cause of this is undoubtedly the favour it has found in the eyes of club promoters, for it is the palatial buildings of these institutions that have chiefly robbed the street of its old-world appearance. But at its eastern extremity, the greatest alteration is due to the demolition of Carlton House, which practically occupied the centre of Waterloo Place at its southern end, and extended east and west with its grounds, entrance court, and screen, where Carlton House Terrace and the Duke of York’s monument now exist.

CARLTON HOUSE.

George IV. proclaimed King.

The history of Carlton House has not been written. It is probably just as well that no one has attempted to record the annals of that mansion, for what we know of it from the innumerable memoirs and diaries of the period covering the better part of George III.’s reign and the Regency, is not particularly edifying.

Carlton House was built in 1709, by Lord Carlton, or Carleton, as it was then spelt, on whose death, in 1725, the house came into the possession of his nephew, the Earl of Burlington. Kent laid out the gardens, which extended from Spring Gardens to Marlborough House, at the back of the entire length of Pall Mall, east and west. Lord Burlington presented the house to his mother, who sold it, in 1732, to Lord Chesterfield, purchasing on behalf of Frederick, Prince of Wales. After that Prince’s death, his widow resided here till her demise in 1772. Eleven years later, George, Prince of Wales, came into possession, and under his auspices, with the help of Holland, the architect, the place was practically rebuilt, the brickwork being covered with stone, a Corinthian portico added, and that celebrated screen erected, of which Prince Hoare once wrote:

“Dear little columns, all in a row,

What do you do there?

Indeed, we don’t know!”

on the site of some houses which had previously hidden the mansion from Pall Mall. (See Plates at pp. 64 and 76.)

Under its new master, Carlton House witnessed many vicissitudes; now being the scene of the most lavish entertainments; anon being practically shut up, when the Prince could not persuade his Royal father to ask Parliament for money to pay his perennial debts, and tried to force his hand by an exhibition of erratic economy; at one time teeming with the gay crowd that formed the Prince’s court, when the great Whig families rallied around him, and the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire—“the best bred woman in Europe”—the Duchess of Rutland, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and Mrs. Crewe of the “Buff and Blue” toast, “rained influence”; at another time echoing to the merry wit of Sheridan, the classical allusions of Fox, the broad stories of Hanger, and even the rich tones of the great Sir Walter himself as he joined in the vociferous cheering that greeted the toast of “The Author of Waverley.”

If those walls could have related what they heard, many an unedifying tale would have been told, but also the actual truth of many an anecdote which tradition has handed down to us. Did Brummell really tell the Prince to “ring the bell,” and did his Royal Highness do so, and order “Mr. Brummell’s carriage”? Did the Royal host become so actually imbued with the idea that he had been present at Waterloo, that he would frequently refer to the hero of that day, with: “Was I not there, Duke?” to which Wellington was wont to reply, with a bow and a grim smile, “I have often heard you say so, Sir?” Did Sir Philip Francis on one occasion go up to the entrance and, instead of ringing the bell, knock loudly on the door with his stick; and did the Prince Regent’s confidential friend, Colonel McMahon, subsequently expostulate with, “Upon my word, Francis, you must try and keep Sir Philip in order? Do you know he has been knocking at the Prince’s door with a stick, and making such a noise, because he was not admitted, that we thought we should never get him away?”

These, and how many other stories might we not substantiate or otherwise with the help of that mural evidence!

“But the long pomp, the midnight masquerade,

With all the freaks of wanton wealth array’d,”

have passed away with Carlton House for ever, and in its place we have the flight of stone steps leading to the Park, down which a carriage had once rushed headlong but for Mr. Gladstone’s restraining hand, and a stone Duke of York gazing at the sky.

The Prince Regent, when he became George IV., thought of connecting Carlton House with Marlborough House by a great gallery running the length of Pall Mall, and dedicated to the portraits of the Royal and notable persons of this country. Had he done so, he would have anticipated the National Portrait Gallery of to-day, and built a nobler Valhalla; but Nash was allowed to demolish Carlton House and cover its site with the great mansions and terraces which now stand there.

The Princess Charlotte—the nation’s hope, so untimely cut off—was born at Carlton House, but she is more closely connected with Warwick House, which almost adjoined it on the east side, and stood at the end of Warwick Street, which still exists. The original Warwick House had been the birthplace of that Sir Philip Warwick, whose memoirs of his Royal master, Charles I., are frequently to be met with. When the Princess Charlotte lived here with her governess, Miss Knight, the latter states that the entrance was secured by bars of iron on the inside, and that the Princess was obliged to go through the court of Carlton House. The same lady gives as dreary an account of the house, as Fanny Burney did of Kew Palace; it was, she says, “an old moderate-sized dwelling, at that time miserably out of repair, and almost falling to ruins.” This was in 1813; in the following year the Princess, worn out by petty restraints, the coercive measures of the Prince Regent, and above all her enforced separation from her mother, escaped from the house and drove in a hackney cab to Queen Caroline’s then residence in Connaught Place. Hither, however, she returned at the urgent solicitations of Brougham and the Duke of Sussex; and here, subsequently, occurred that scene between the Regent and the Princess and her attendants which forms the subject of a well-known caricature drawing.

It is difficult to pass by Charing Cross and its manifold memories, but if we gave way to the temptation, we should find fresh attractions in Whitehall and the Strand, and I must unwillingly refrain from penetrating further east. The Haymarket, which we are now going up, and Piccadilly east, which we shall presently come to, are, however, both so full of interest that I hope we shall find matter in these “pastures new” to compensate us.

CHAPTER III.

THE HAYMARKET, ST. JAMES’S SQUARE, AND
PICCADILLY (EAST).

“A spacious street of great resort.”—Strype.

THE HAYMARKET.

The Haymarket is one of those thoroughfares whose names speak for themselves. To-day, it is true, it has little the appearance of that which its title indicates, and it is, therefore, all the pleasanter to find its older uses recalled in its present denomination. The curious thing is that the St. James’s hay-market, which was held close by, so early as the days of Elizabeth, should have survived to so comparatively recently as the reign of William IV.; yet it was not till 1830, that the Act was passed which removed the market to the vicinity of Regent’s Park. That the Haymarket was long an important thoroughfare is evidenced by Strype, who calls it “a spacious street of great resort, full of inns and places of entertainment, especially on the west side.”

Let us first see what were the “inns” which clustered here in such profusion that a solemn topographer should have thought it necessary to specifically mention them. The names of some of them have survived, and I find, appropriately enough, “The Nag’s Head,” “The White Horse,” “The Black Horse,” and “The Cock,” as well as “The Phœnix” (that perennial fowl), “The Unicorn” (that hardly less ubiquitous animal), and “The Blue Posts,” one of the best known of them all. If we look at a plan of this locality, dated 1755, we shall see that the west side of the street was riddled with small alleys or yards, some of which were part and parcel of the taverns that once congregated here. Thus, nearly at the bottom, on the site of the Carlton Hotel, was Phœnix Inn Yard; next to it, where His Majesty’s Theatre now stands, the yard of “The White Horse”; “The Cock” Yard was about half-way up, and “The Nag’s Head” Yard next it. At the back of these, approached from Pall Mall by two streets, known as St. Alban’s, and Market Streets, was the St. James’s Market itself, since replaced by an extension of Regent Street and Waterloo Place. “Black Horse” Yard was nearly at the top of the Haymarket, where the continuation of Jermyn Street now runs, and practically on the site of the Piccadilly Station of the Tube Railway; while where Charles Street crosses the Haymarket on its western side was formerly a small passage, known as Six Bell Alley.

“The Blue Posts” Tavern was at No. 59, and was long a favourite resort. Otway mentions it in one of his plays; so does Bishop Cartwright in his diary; and in contemporary newspapers are accounts of those affrays which so frequently disturbed the harmony of these places of recreation.

“The Cock” was probably identical with the tavern bearing this sign in Suffolk Street close by, which Pepys mentions, and which it is likely had something to do with the origin of the name of the adjacent Cockspur Street; while the other taverns must have often afforded refreshment to the various notable people, who once resided in the Haymarket.

One of the greatest of these, who we know loved to take his ease at his inn, was Addison, who, while lodging in an attic over a small shop here, wrote “The Campaign,” at the request of the Government. One day, in after years, a little deformed man with eloquent eyes, fired with enthusiasm, brought a friend to this same attic, and mounting the three pair of stairs, opened the door of the small room, and exclaimed, “In this garret Addison wrote his ‘Campaign’”—it was Pope pointing out the workshop of genius to Harte.

Among various past notable residents, Sir Samuel Garth stands for physic in the Haymarket; his house, from 1699 to 1703, being the sixth door from the top, on the east side; and histrionic art is well represented by Mrs. Oldfield, who was residing close by, from 1714 to 1726. Garth was a poet besides being a physician, and in the former rôle ridiculed apothecaries, about whom he must have known more than most men, in his well-known “Dispensary,” a poem which appeared in the year he came to live here. Nance Oldfield, if not of blameless life, was indisputably a great actress, and I believe the only one who lies in the Abbey, where her remains were buried with much pomp and circumstance.

Painting, as is appropriate in a street which to-day boasts a number of well-known picture shops, is represented by George Morland, who was born here in 1763. The inequality of his work is characteristic of the ups and downs of his reckless life; at one time he was producing masterpieces, at another he was dashing off pot-boilers and tavern signs. One wonders if among the latter was that sign which Broughton, the pugilist, hung outside his public-house between the Haymarket and Cockspur Street, and which represented the champion boxer himself “in his habit as he lived.”

Nearly at the top of the street on the east side is an old tobacconist’s shop (who does not know Fribourg’s?) which, in appearance, carries us back to Georgian days, and shows how much has been lost in picturesqueness by the modern methods of shop-building. Wishart’s, another tobacconist’s, which has, however, unfortunately disappeared, must have looked very much then as Fribourg’s continues to do to-day. But the Haymarket has undergone such a metamorphosis that the latter is the only survival of a past day, if we except the portico of the Haymarket Theatre; and now that a Tube Railway Station has invaded the street, the last touch has been given to it in the way of modernity.

It is, however, appropriate that the spot in which Nance Oldfield once lived should be so associated with the “vagabonds” as is this thoroughfare, for here are the Haymarket Theatre, and His Majesty’s, which latter stands partly on the site of that Haymarket Opera House, Queen’s Theatre, King’s Theatre, and Her Majesty’s Theatre—to give it all its various names—which most of us remember.

THE HAYMARKET THEATRE.

I will say a word about the Haymarket Theatre first, because it still exists, and by its porticoed front helps to recall the Haymarket itself of earlier days.

The present theatre, as we shall see, followed an earlier one which stood not actually on its site, but on ground adjoining it, as may be seen from an old view of this portion of the Haymarket.

This play-house was originally intended for use during the summer, and in consequence of there being a more important theatre then in existence (on the site of His Majesty’s), it was known as “The Little Theatre in the Haymarket.” Built at the not extravagant cost of £1,500, by one John Potter, it was opened on December 29th, 1721, by a French Company, who styled themselves “The Duke of Montagu’s French Comedians.” Their initial piece does not seem to have been a success; and later “The Female Fop” (which Sandford says he wrote in a few weeks, when but fifteen years of age), died a natural death after only a few nights’ performance, although it served its purpose in helping to inaugurate the new venture.

Some years later—to be precise, in 1735—the play-house was taken by a company bearing the strange title of “The Great Mogul’s Company,” and here Fielding’s “Pasquin” and “Historical Register” were given. These plays never pretended to be anything but satires, and it is interesting to know that their performance occasioned the passing of “The Licensing Act,” which first gave the Lord Chamberlain that power of veto over plays, the exercise of which has been the cause of so much heart-burning ever since; and which, at the time, was the cause of many amusing attempts at evasion, particularly by Theophilus Cibber, one of the earlier managers, and Foote, whose invitation to the public “to drink a dish of chocolate with him” could hardly have misled even the most unsophisticated of country cousins.

For three years from 1744, Macklin managed the theatre, and was then succeeded by Foote, who continued to run the house, off and on, for no less than thirty successful years. With his “Devil on Two Sticks” he is said to have cleared between three and four thousand pounds, of which, by the bye, little or nothing was left at the end of the year. Foote, indeed, had a remarkable aptitude for squandering money, and the motto which he had placed in his carriage: “Iterum, iterum, iterumque,” had a new significance given it by his perpetually renewed attempts to replace the money that had taken unto itself wings!

In 1766, a patent was passed for the establishment of a new theatre here, for Foote; and in the following year it was made a “Royal Theatre.” Just ten years later Foote sold his interest in the house to the elder Colman, on the apparently splendid terms of an annuity of £1,600, and permission to play as often and when he liked to the extent of a further £400 a year. But although one can understand Dr. Johnson’s wonder as to what Colman was going to make out of it, the arrangement turned out well for him, as Foote died within a year, and played only three times.

Colman was succeeded in his management by his son, whose first season commenced in 1790, and who, fifteen years later, sold half his share to Messrs. Morris and Winston. Later, the well-known Thomas Dibdin took over the concern, and it was during his management that, on August 15th, 1805, occurred a great riot here, organised by members of the sartorial trade, who took exception to the performance of a piece entitled “The Tailors, a Tragedy for Warm Weather,” as reflecting on their calling. To such a height, indeed, did matters come that special constables and a company of the Life Guards were requisitioned to assist the regular Bow Street officers.

Some years later—to be precise, in 1820—the present play-house, whose historian is the well-known actor-manager, Mr. Cyril Maude—was erected, from the designs of Nash, at a cost of £18,000; the earlier theatre remained open until the larger house was finished, when it closed, on October 14th, 1820, with a performance of “King Lear.”

I may remind the reader that such great exponents of the Thespian art, as Mrs. Abington, Miss Farren, Edwin, Elliston, Bannister, Henderson, and “Gentleman Lewis” have all acted at the original house; while the great names of Macready, Webster, and Buckstone, besides Sothern, the Bancrofts, Mr. Tree, and Mr. Cyril Maude in our own days, are among those closely associated with the present theatre.

It was of the Haymarket Theatre that the story is told that that inveterate punster H. J. Byron was once asked (I believe by Lady—then Mrs.—Bancroft) to give a motto to be placed over the pay-office, when he immediately suggested “So much for Booking ’em” as an appropriate heading!

SUFFOLK STREET.

Suffolk Street, running partly behind the play-house, is one of the older streets in this neighbourhood, having been formed in 1664, on the site once occupied by the town house of the Earls of Suffolk. Although the present street is relatively modern, its lines follow those of the older one. At its Pall Mall eastern corner stands the United University Club in its stately rebuilt magnificence, but the street is connected more intimately with Art than Letters, being the home of the Society of British Artists. Once it echoed to the tread of Swift, when he came to visit Vanessa, who for a time lodged here with her mother. Adam Smith was a former resident, as was Moll Davis, for whom the King furnished a house here, before her apotheosis in St. James’s Square hard by, as Pepys tells us; and when the Italian Corticelli had his town house here, frequented, in the days of George I., for raffles and assignations, the little thoroughfare must have presented a gay and gallant sight, with which its present-day solemn respectability cannot have much in common.