 CHAPTER 1 OF THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLI When prefaces are read at all they are read most often after the rest of the book, and nearly always I imagine they are written after it, but I am writing this before a line else of my book is done, and on this ground I venture to approach the courteous reader with the hopes that he also, if this beginning should catch his eye, will be unusual and read the preface before the book. I wish to place before myself as well as before him, precisely, more or less, what I shall try to accomplish. There is no new salient fact to be told of Piccadilly. The keen eyes of the late Mr. Peter Cunningham and of Mr. H. B. Wheatley have noted practically every house where a great man lived, and have told us the complete story of Piccadilly's origin and early eventfulness. I wish at the outset to express my great and essential obligation to them, and to other writers on the subject, more especially to Mr. Wheatley's roundabout Piccadilly and Palmal, to which book my own is indebted for a great many facts and references. At this point too I wish to thank the Reverend W. J. Lofty for many useful hints in my work. But other writers occupying a much wider field than mine have had of necessity to confine themselves for the most part, to telling us that in such and such houses lived such and such men, of whom such and such anecdotes are told. My local limitation enables me to attempt something more, and that is to recall in some fashion, if I may, the atmospheres that were about these men, and the tales told of them. I have space to elaborate and gossip, and so I propose to fill it. I trust there is no immodesty in avowing this desire to add something, in a sense, to the work of men much superior to me in antiquarian knowledge. The rest of the book will show if the hope was foolish, but I would claim the antecedent excuse of fairly wide and constant study in our social history since Piccadilly began to be built of a great love for these associations, and for this helps, I think, that my feet have trod its pavement most days for years whose number is beginning to depress me. A local limitation of this sort may not be obviously useful. On a gossip, however, some limit must be put, and this one suggests a more variously interesting book than if I had chosen a wider space and a shorter period. Having taken it, I shall keep to it strictly. We shall walk up no streets on the right or left, the Albany, I think, one may take as a single house rather than a street. If that be an exception, it is the only one, and surely, if any part of any city deserves a book to itself, it is Piccadilly. We shall stand, the reader and I, before some house, in the hours when the traffic is stilled, and I shall tell him of its history, of the men and women who dwelt there, and talked, and loved, and gambled, and lived, and died. And since to interest him I must interest myself, I shall follow the lines of my temperament and tastes, rather than those of completeness and impartiality. It is likely I shall be voluble about Byron, and reticent about Macaulay. If the tale bores him, he can to bed without discurtersy. Standing to-day in Piccadilly, in any ordinary hour of the traffic, or sitting in a room facing it, with the window open, we remark that we cannot hear ourselves speak, so my book is in some measure an epitaph. For a place where we cannot hear ourselves speak is not likely to be favoured with fresh associations of the sort I commemorate. People will cease to live in it or to walk in it for pleasure. Even clubs will disappear from it, and hurry up side streets in search of comparative quietude. The advocates of motor omnibuses claim that the main thoroughfares must be given up to them, and people who value peace live elsewhere. Either that, or the machines must be made noiseless, which even their advocates do not contemplate, or our nerves must become insensible. It is true that a hundred years ago with the innumerable street cries and the freer voices of our ancestors, nay even thirty years ago when the cobblestones were still used, the actual volume of sound was greater. But one can grow used to the continual rumble over stones, and cries which irritate the nerves do not deafen the ears. Spasmodic machinery, suddenly grunting and shrieking defeats and routs us finally. It is probable then that the melancholy prophecy is right, and that the true Piccadilly of history is fast dying. Let us leave it forthwith, and go back to the day when that history was beginning. Let us stand at the top of St. James's street, enter Mr. Wells's time machine, and go back to the year sixteen sixty-four. I chose that year, let me say as we go, because then began the building of great houses in Piccadilly, and its entrance into the main current of our social history. The name, of course, is older, and here it behoves me, I suppose, to give an account of it, reluctantly, and overcoming a temptation to refer my readers to the authorities, and leave them alone in that company, for the facts are obscure without being interesting. In the early part of the seventeenth century then, there was a house in this district, near the top of the hay market, known as Piccadilly Hall. It belonged to one Robert Baker, who made a will, dated April the fourteenth, sixteen twenty-three, in which he left two pounds, ten shillings in money, and ten shillings in bread, to the poor of the parish, namely that of St. Martin's in the fields. In this will he speaks of a tenement in his own occupation, with its garden and cowhouse, and land of the extent of two acres, in two fields behind the muse, all enclosed with a brick wall, but without a name. In the entry of the charity in the accounts of the overseers of the poor, the donor is described as Robert Baker of Piccadilly Hall, and from this it is possible to infer that Robert Baker did not care for the name, which must in that case have been a nickname. There was also a gaming house hereabouts, also known as Piccadilly, and otherwise as Shaver's Hall, that is, according to Mr. Wheatley, who thinks that Piccadilly Hall was a private house, and that the district having got the name of Piccadilly, the gaming house was also so-called. If, however, there is anything in Mr. Baker's omitting the name from his will, it seems probable that his house was in some way public, otherwise it would hardly have been given a nickname he regarded as derogatory. Be that as it may, I think it is clear that Shaver's Hall was not originally called Piccadilly, because George Garrod writes to Lord Conway, May 30, 1636, Simon Oustbiston's house is newly christened. It is called Shaver's Hall, as other neighbouring places thereabouts are nicknamed Tart Lane, Piccadilly Hall, and he goes on to say that the nickname was not derived from the builder's profession. He was barber to Lord Pembroke, but because Lord Dunbar lost 3,000 pounds at a sitting, and was said to be shaved. Well, but in 1641 Lord Clarendon, then Mr. Hyde, went to a place called Piccadilly, which was a fair house for entertainment and gaming, with handsome gravel walks with shade, and where were an upper and lower bowling-green with a very many of the nobility and gentry of the best quality resorted, both for exercise and conversation. I opine that either this was a development of Baker's House, or that Shaver's Hall had come later to be confused with it, and called Piccadilly, or that this was a house distinct from both. To it, at any rate, resorted Sir John Suckling. Natural, easy Suckling, as Millamant calls him in, The Way of the World, the poetical gallant who was famous for bowling and card-playing. He did use, says Aubrey, to practise by himself a bed, and then studied the best way of managing the cards. That has something of a sinister air, but in spite of it we will find his sisters coming to the Peccadillo bowling-green crying for fear he should lose all their portions, and the end of it all was suicide in Paris. Other gallants of less interest came to grief at Piccadilly, but we need not linger over their fortunes. Very early the name seems to have been extended to the district, for in the second edition of Gerard's Herbal, published in 1633, we have the little wild bugloss grows upon the dry ditch banks about Piccadilla and almost everywhere. It grew, that is, in the fields, by the western road, on the way to Reading, fields that in 1633 came up to Piccadilly Circus. Yes, but still, why Piccadilly? Well, Piccadill, says Thomas Blount in 1656, was the 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 that famous ordinary Neersen James, called Piccadilly, took denomination, because it was then the outmost or skirt house of the suburbs that way. Others say that it took its name from this, that one Higgins, a tailor who built it, got most of his estate by Piccadills, which in the last age were much worn in England. Higgins, says Mr Wheatley, is a myth, and the former derivation the more probable. I confess, it seems to me, unlikely, that a house should be called the skirt house, because it was the outmost house, and it hardly amounts to a nickname, as Piccadilly seems to have been. On the other hand, without wishing to revive Higgins, I think it more or less natural to nickname a place of resort from an obtrusive piece of fashionable raiment, like a stiff collar worn by its frequenters. I remember that in my boyhood there was a popular satirical song called Captain Cuff, from the habit of shooting out the cuffs alleged to mark military officers. In the same way, I can imagine a place frequented by gallants in remarkably stiff Piccadills, coming to be called Piccadill or Piccadilly Hall. In the impartial spelling of the 17th century, it was written, Piccadilla, Piccadilla, Piccadill, Piccadill, and even Piccadilly, but it is not an attractive explanation. More so is the idea that a Spaniard coming over with Philip in Queen Mary's time opened a gambling house and called it, as with a shrug and a smile, his Pecadillo. Unfortunately, there is no more evidence for the Spaniard's existence than for Higgins's, that Orbury, as we have seen, writes Pecadillo and Evelyn on one occasion, Piccadillo, does not signify much, but I cannot help thinking that some association in people's minds with Pecadillo and its pleasant suggestions helped the rapid popularity and extension of the name. From being originally confined to what is now Coventry Street and the extreme east of Piccadilly, the part west to St. James's Street, being called Portugal Street in complement to Catherine of Braganza, it was rapidly applied to the whole thoroughfare as it was built over to Hyde Park Corner. It is indeed a pleasant sound. Piccadilly conveying to us the idea of a sunny spring morning and what lightness and gaiety there was in English life and manners. And now, clearing our mind from these intricacies of origin, which are not much in my way to expound, but which I trust are tolerably clear in this brief statement, let us descend from our time machine at the top of St. James's Street in 1664 into a clearer air than now, although the sootiness of it was already a matter of complaint. As the sense of greater space and clarity refreshes our eyes, the noise of building and the cheerful voices of Caroline Workman strike our ears, for directly opposite us, where now is the bottom of Albemarle Street. My Lord Chancellor Clarendon is building him the great house whose sad fortune I shall talk to you about presently. And hard by this imposing edifice, with its projecting centre and extremes, if we look eastward we see Burlington House, also a building, less ornately than it was afterwards made, but clearly destined for a great man's occupation. If we walk to the east, we shall notice some ordinary houses and shops of the period, notably one at the corner of Sackville Street, now Lincoln Bennett's, the Hatter's, where dwells Sir William Petty, great at the Admiralty, and a friend of Mr. Peeps. If we like to go so far as the sight of the criterion, we shall find that Stuart London, too, thought it a good place for refreshment, and may enter the White Bear Inn, unless you be so nice about dates, as to object to fossil my critics, that the first mention of it is 1685. In this eastern part of Piccadilly there are many people afoot, bustling and talking, sometimes kissing one another on meeting, all alert with that determination to enjoy life, which marked the early years of the restoration. I am sorely tempted to bid you mark yonder tall, dark man, with harsh features oddly contrasting with his good-humoured laugh, as he talks with his companions, walking swiftly. Bid you mark him and uncover as he passes. It is the King going without ceremony to look at his Chancellor's new house. The King, to whose love of mixing with his people, we owe it that St. James's Park has been free to the public since his day. The women are prettily dressed, and so for that are the men, though their dress has already declined from the punctilious elegance of Charles the First's time to over much lace and finery. The King was to try to change it for a plain Persian vest, but in clothes Englishmen have always been intractable. On the verge of the open country, however, as we are, we may well see a country gentleman or so coming into town in his manly and sensible country habit, his Devonshire suit, his Dutch felt hat, his worsted stockings, and his strong shoes. We walk westwards again. If we had come a year later, Barkley House, which is now Devonshire House, would be building also, but to gain it, we should have to pass the turnpike at the corner of Barkley Street. Thenceforward is open country, the western road, without pavement, adapt to be The mud gets worse as we pass what now is Brick Street at the side of the Isthmian club, where the Tyburn stream flows right across Piccadilly. But that we may not leave Piccadilly, we might follow the course of the stream up for a little way, and understand why the pavement still rings hollow in lands down passage. There is a stone bridge over the Tyburn in Piccadilly with an evil reputation, for the historian Norden had written in 1593 of King's Bridge, commonly called Stone Bridge, near Hyde Park Corner, where I wish no true man to walk too late without good guard, unless he can make his party good, as did Sir H. Nivet, Knight, who valiantly defended himself, there being assaulted, and slew the master thief with his own hands. If it happens to be May Day, we might cross the bridge and go on to Hyde Park, where the people will be flocking from all parts near, otherwise it is hardly worth our while, unless you would like to go to one of the many public houses near Hyde Park Corner, built to assuage the outlying thirst of Knight's Bridge. Let us then move forward into the third decade of the next century. We shall find the eastern quarter much the same, but many more houses and consequent bustle in the western. Devonshire House conceals its front from us, mercifully or not, by the unbroken brick wall we remember before the present duke fetched his gates from Chiswick. It has lost what it had when it first was built, the most splendid and spacious gardens in London, stretching all over the site of Lansdowne House and Barclay Square. Clarendon House is gone, and Bond Street, Albimalle Street, and Dover Street are come. The turnpike is gone from the end of Barclay Street. It was taken to Hyde Park Corner in 1721, but our stone bridge over the Tyburn remains. In the hollow where the Ispenean Club is, there was a flood in 1726, and carriages overset there. Piccadilly is not yet urban enough to be free from highwaymen, and of course it is dark at night. We had best walk down it in the morning. Just as we cross our bridge, there is a yard for statuary at the corner of Engine Street, now stupidly called Brick Street. We note several more of these depressing places where now are famous houses, exhibiting the contemporary English taste in statues, and most offensive to Mr. Horace Walpole. They are now happily gone to the decent obscurity of the Mariliband Road, but other houses than warehouses, and of course public houses, there are in plenty, mostly mean, however, and devoted to lodgings. House is enough to attract street criers, each with his tune, more or less melodious. Men and women offering to sell us everything and do almost anything for us. Apple women, bandbox men, bellows-menders, heaven knows what. With luck we shall see a tumbler and a dancing girl, and may listen to a ballad singer. We may get a speedy cure for agues of all sorts, from William Denman, at the golden ball near Hyde Park Corner, and nowhere else, as an advertisement tells us. And, by the way, as late as 1834 I have noticed in Boyle's Guide that Piccadilly was a great place for surgeons. As we walk thither we may see all kinds of people, powdered and patched ladies in sedan chairs, and men too in them, powdered also and elaborately dressed, for the careless fashion set by Fox, who had been a macaroni, and his friends, is still some fifty years off. We may see the earliest umbrellas carried abroad, perhaps the Duchess of Bedford, with a black holding one over her, as she is seen in a print of 1730. But let us speed our machine some forty years onwards, and come at length to the true glory of Piccadilly. It is a Cumbly street now indeed. The statuaries have disappeared, and in their place stand many fair houses, much as we know them now. Coventry House, which is now the St. James's Club, and Egremont House, which became Cumbly House, and Cambridge House for George III's son, and is now the Naval and Military or In-and-out Club, and many another. They look over the slope down the Green Park, with no other side of the street to block the view, only the Sulky side, Sulky Terrace, as the late Admiral MacDonald called it, where one might stroll when one would not be greeted. In the Green Park itself opposite Down Street stands the Rangers Lodge, which is gone. Humbler houses, too, there are still, like the Lodging House, where the Fielding's Squire Western was sent, by the landlord of the Pillars of Hercules at Hyde Park Corner, the Pillars of Hercules where Sheridan went, when he was interrupted in his duel with Captain Matthews over the beautiful Miss Linnley. From this time onwards, Piccadilly becomes a centre, and by far the fairest of our articulate history. Great names, greatly suggestive to all who care for that history, it may claim for its own, dotted up and down by it, by right of housing them, and if we add the men and women who for clubs or their friends' houses frequented it, there is hardly a great name that is absent. In my pages, only those who had an essential connection with Piccadilly may appear, but they may serve the purpose of the least continent gossip. A Piccadilly duty went out on canvassing duty in 1780 for Charles Fox, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, the most admired and perhaps the best loved woman of her time. She goes out from Devonshire House, and we, strolling down Piccadilly, pass Fanny Burney's lodgings at 89, and go on to the Duke of Queensbury's house at 138. We might wait twenty years or more for our stroll back, and still old Q is at 138, a very old man leering on his balcony, and we may see Scott going into his friend's demerg's house. 96, it was 15 Piccadilly West, and three doors off Nelson's wonderful Emma, coming out of her husband, Sir William Hamilton's. Yet a few years and Brummel, finally dished, is leaving Wattier's famous club at 81, or Lady Byron is leaving for good or evil, the same house where old Q died, or we turn our machine another half century, and Palmerston is living at Cambridge House, and the Ashburton's at Bath House are entertaining Tennyson and Thomas Carlisle, and, but it is time to be more particularly local, and to take the houses in detail. End of chapter one. Chapter two of The Ghosts of Piccadilly. This Librivox recording is in the public domain, recording by Peter Yersley. The Ghosts of Piccadilly, by G. S. Street. Chapter two, Contrasted Fates, Clarendon House, and Devonshire House. Three years or less from its building, Clarendon House was a monument of fallen greatness. Within twenty years it was gone forever. Devonshire House, built a year later, has been for two hundred years the home of one of the very few most prosperous families in England, and shelters still perhaps the most distinguished head of that family. For eighteen years they stood side by side. I do not know that there is any moral in particular to be drawn from the circumstance, unless that it is safer to go slowly, but the Contrast must needs a rest the eye of a moralist. The building of Clarendon House in itself seems to show a man whose head was turned by high position. In 1664 Hyde was at the summit of his power, Lord Chancellor of England, and still over owing his sovereign. His daughter was wife to the heir apparent, but Charles was already wearying of this tutelage, and anxious to escape from it, and two great shadows were on their way, the arrival of an unhappy war, and the non-arrival of a child to the queen, which were to darken the Chancellor's head in the eyes of the people. He has married his daughter to the Duke of York, and looks to be grandfather of kings curse him, said the people. However, in 1664 Charles granted him a large tract of land eastwards to Swallow Street, which now is, and uncertainly, but generously, westwards, and later the City of London gave him, practically, a lease of the conduit mead covered now by New Bond Street, Brook Street, and so forth. He chose the spot at the top of St. James's Street, fronting St. James's Palace, which, to the envious, this upstart palace might seem to rival, and began building with the stones intended to repair old St. Paul's, in itself a tactless proceeding. The admiring peeps, and the complimentary Evelyn, recorded the erection in diaries and letters. Evelyn wrote to Lord Cornbury, Clarendon's son, a most eloquent panagiric on it, and pronounced it, the first palace in England, deserving all I have said of it, and a better encomiasse, and ended with the pious wish that when, Clarendon, shall have passed to that upper building not made with hands, his posterity, as you, my lord, might inherit the palace, and the rest of his greatness, alas for the builder, so soon to be ruined and his posterity to be impoverished. In 1667 the deluge began, the Dutch sailed up to Gravesend, and the mob broke the windows of Clarendon House, they called it Holland House, suggesting bribes from the Dutch, Duncork House, with the idea that Clarendon was bribed to sell Duncork, and Tangier Hall, because they had no use for Tangier, which he had acquired for England, a most unpopular edifice. They have cut down the trees before his house, writes Peeps, and broke his windows, and a gibbet either set up before or painted upon his gate, and these words writ, three sites to be seen, Duncork, Tangier, and a barren queen. This last accusation, as Mr Wheatley says, was unjust, because Clarendon could not help it, had even opposed the marriage with Catherine of Braganza, but the mob was not alone in giving him the blame of the unlucky non-result. The courts did so, too, and Rochester, challenged by the king to find a rhyme to Lisbon, fired off, Here's a health to Kate, our sovereign's mate, of the royal house of Lisbon, but the devil take hide and the bishop beside, who made her bone of his bone, and impromptu, let us hope, for then the rhyme is brilliant. Two months later Sir William Morris was sent to the fine new house to demand the great seal from its owner, so he sat in his great house with its wings and its turret in the middle, and its low wall running along Piccadilly, and its fine gates, sat there, and wondered how long he might sit there still. The workmen were not yet out of the place altogether, and I daresay Clarendon guessed with what jibes they were building for him. Evelyn visited him in December, and found him in his garden at his new built palace, sitting in his gout wheelchair, and seeing the gates setting up towards the north and the fields. He looked and spoke very disconsolently. The picture is pathetic enough, for if Clarendon fell short of being a great man, he was at least a zealous and strenuous man. He had shared his master's exile, and had seen the cause of his master triumph, only himself to fall. He was impeached for high treason, and wrote humbly to Charles, I do upon my knees beg your pardon for any overbold or saucy expressions I have used to you, a natural disease in old servants who have received too much countenance. For a sensualist, Charles was not hard-hearted, but Clarendon had gone too far and too long against his comfort, and he let his old servants enemies have their way. Clarendon fled to Calais to die in exile seven years later, and Pius Versifiers took care to dwell on the affair of those unlucky stones. God wrote one. God will revenge too for the stones he took from aged Pauls to make a nest for rooks. The house was leased by his sons Cornbury and Lawrence Hyde, who was a favorite and companion of Charles, to the Duke of Ormond. There again is a figure sorrowful in a way, though not disastrous. At the court of Charles II Ormond was out of date. He was a great noble, too great, unless indeed he had overtly combated the government, to be sent the way of Clarendon, a new man, and Charles himself never failed in respect to this old and potent servant of his father. It is recorded that Buckingham once asked him whether the Duke of Ormond had lost his favor or he the dukes, since it was the king who was embarrassed when they met. But this was a parvenu court. His ancient nobility fatigued the king, and he set about him new people, male and female, who could amuse him. The Duke of Ormond must have chafed at the upstarts and foreigners who were more powerful than he, and must have known that there was something ironical in their deference to him, that his statelyness and older fashion were ridiculed behind his back. It was fated that no happy man should be master in Clarendon House. It was while he lived there that a most extraordinary outrage was done on him, and that perhaps the most extraordinary scene that has ever happened in Piccadilly took place. It was finished there, if it was begun in St. James's Street, and so comes scrupulously into my pages. In the year 1670, less than two centuries and a half ago, this powerful noble, driving up St. James's Street towards his house fronting it. In his coach, with six footmen attending him, was set upon by Ruffians, seized and hurried along Piccadilly towards Tyburn, where they proposed to hang him. I am tempted to digress into the history of Colonel Blood, that most melodramatic villain with the most convenient name, a history which no romancer would have dared to invent. It would colour my quiet pages to relate how he stole the crown from the tower, and very nearly got off with it, and other surprising feats. But it is not in the bond, and the reader may go on to no more recondite a source than Scott's notes to his peverell of the peak, and the adventure I may tell is startling enough. The Duke of Ormond had been dining in the city, in attendance on the Prince of Orange, then in England, and was returning home. It was a dark night. He always took six footmen abroad with him, but did not allow their weight on his coach, having spikes on it to prevent their clamouring up. They went on either side of the street. Blood's Ruffians contrived to stop the footmen, while Blood and his son dragged the Duke from the coach. And now, if Blood had been content with simple murder, he might have done it. But the Duke was his old enemy. He had attributed to Ormond the act of settlement in England of 1663, which had inconvenienced Lieutenant Blood, as he was then, and by a plot had nearly captured Dublin Castle, and Ormond the chief lieutenant of the time within it. Like a proper villain of melodrama, Blood never quite succeeded in his failed purposes. So now his artist Villany prompted a finer revenge than a mere stabbing. He would hang the Duke at Tyburn. They forced him on horseback and buckled him to one of the Ruffians, and then Blood rode off saying he would tie a rope to the gallows. The coachman, meanwhile, drove on to Clarendon House and gave the alarm, telling the porter, all this is from Thomas Cart, who wrote a history of Ormond. That the Duke had been seized by two men who had carried him down Piccadilly. Blood's Swagger undid him. For the Duke, though sixty, which was old age in those days, was still a man of his hands, and struggled valiantly so that the Ruffian in front of him made but slow progress. They had got a good way past Devonshire House, however, on the road between the fields towards Knightsbridge, where the Duke cleverly got his foot under the Ruffians and fell with him into the mud. By now the neighbourhood was alarmed, and rescue was arriving, and the Ruffian made off, so that Blood, coming impatiently back from Tyburn to meet his victim, found his followers in flight. The Duke, exhausted, had to be carried home to Clarendon House, and lay ill there for some days. I fear Piccadilly is no pleasant haunting place for his ghost. No happy person ever possessed Clarendon House. It was sold after Clarendon's death to the young Duke of Albemarle, the second monk's son, and he was a spendthrift and a drunkard. Note, Clarges Street, by the way, is called after his uncle, Sir Thomas. End note. He went out to Jamaica to seek a sunken Spanish galleon, found his galleon, but lived not to enjoy the gold. His widow was a madwoman, whose illusion that she should marry the grand Turk made the fortune of the first Duke of Montague, but her history belongs not to Piccadilly. The Duke of Albemarle sold Clarendon House, which he had called Albemarle House, to a little syndicate, as we now affectionately call such bodies, which gave 35,000 pounds for the house and the ground about it. The syndicate seems to have known its business, since Evelyn tells us that it recovered this money by the sale of the old materials alone. Its leading spirit was Sir Thomas Bond of Peckham. So the ill-fated house was pulled down, and four new streets, Dover, Albemarle, Bond and Stafford, were built on its site. The name of one of the earliest of those speculators who are the pride of our country immortalized among them. It was being pulled down when Evelyn drove by with Lord Clarendon, the Chancellor's son, and tactfully, as he tells us, turned his head the other way. Evelyn too moralizes very beautifully over the demolition. See, says he, and so say I, the vicissitudes of earthly things. Turn we to a happier theme. Devonshire House was at first Barclay House, built in 1665 for Lord Barclay of Stratton, who has left both these names to the streets on either side. With him I need not linger, nor do more than mention the fact that Queen Anne lived here in 1695. The Cavendishes began their long possession in 1697, with William the First Duke of Devonshire. There seems ever to have been a sort of dignified reticence about this family, which greatly impresses me as a man, but rather baffles me as a scribbler. The roaring generations flit and fade, and there is ever a Devonshire filling his eminent position, calm, retiring, imperturbable, and never an amusing thing to tell of any one of them. The First Duke, to be sure, is said by Horace Walpole to have been a patriot among the men, a corridon among the ladies, and a lady complimented him in a poem as one whose soft commanding looks our breasts assailed. But those dashing qualities resulted in no history we can chuckle over now. He did indeed cause a public scandal, but it was in a curiously lugubrious manner. Being a very religious man, as Major Penn Dennis said of his friend who played piquet all day, except on Sundays, the Duke insisted on putting up a monument in a church to the memory of his mistress, Miss Anne Campion, the singer. The public was indignant, and Pope's ready lash fell on the Duke, who was dead by then, and probably would not have paid much attention had he been alive. The Third Duke had the pleasure of rebuilding the house, which was destroyed by fire in 1733, after a design by William Kent. Many severe criticisms have been passed on it, and ironical compliments on the wall, which till lately hid it. Mr. Max Beerbone once wrote an eloquent essay protesting against the insertion of the gates in the wall, but his reason, I think, was that the unbroken brick conveyed an agreeable air of mystery. For my part, the ugliness of Devonshire House, if it is ugly, does not displease me. Plainness and severity of design suit the climate, the atmosphere, the tone and temperament, generally, of London. If architecture, as Goethe said, is as frozen music, then that of London should be solemn marches and simple airs, not roulades and fandangos. Devonshire House is well enough. And so, I do not doubt, were the Third Duke and the Fourth, but there is nothing to say of them. But the Fifth Duke has a luster about him, time cannot dim, for he married Lady Georgiana Spencer. I wonder no one as yet has written a book of duchesses. The very title would make it popular, and it might really be full of the most excellent differences. To my mind, the most interesting figure in it would not be Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire. Force of character, strength of will, and single-hearted selfishness of purpose, exalt the great Sarah, duchess of Malbra, beyond all other duchesses. I sometimes fancy that she with her harsh common sense and her overbearing ways created that popular tradition of a duchess, which humorists and comedies have fixed in the public mind. But most fascinating of duchesses to imagine, far more so than any of those jolly but a little coarse wantons who were made duchesses by Charles II, Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, beyond question, was. Linearly descended from the great duchess I have named, she is said to have been like her, but assuredly must have had a kindness and softness in her face, which the other lacked. Faultlessly beautiful she was not, though that her hair was not without a tinge of red, as Sir Nathaniel Raxall remarked, would not now prevent our thinking her so. But with her freshness and grace, her sensitive, intelligent features, we can picture the outward setting as fit enough for the soul that led and sweetened and held the hearts of that great aristocratic society, and what a society it was. Many writers, this one among the least of them, have tried to express it, but none has quite succeeded. A society coherent, small, as it were a large family of unquestioned authority and power, and therefore free from the nervous assertiveness which marks aristocracy's apparent but unreal, punctilious in a way, but to our conception free-spoken to the last degree, sure of itself, and therefore not superficially exclusive, as indeed the best of English society has seldom been, cultivated sometimes, and always wishing to be thought so, which is at least a better mood than the pride of ignorance so common in England now, amorous, adventurous, free-living, and with the humor ever running to eccentricity, which till lately was always characteristic of our people, high or low, can anyone deny the charm of such a society? It had the vices, I know, which have characterised leisure and abundance in every age. It gambled persistently, and not infrequently broke its marriage vows. Indeed one may regret that certain preachers of our day were not alive then for a proper field for their abilities. The smart set they castigate now is a trivial bogey. Our society is an incoherent mass split up into coteries, and possibly of one cotery or another it may be said with truth that it practises the vices named as a regular habit, but not, and this is the important point, a cotery with power and prestige. Our society is specialised, and the people with political influence are hardworking, innocently recreating folk. What the unimportant smart people do may matter to themselves, but is not the national concern the preachers would have it. The evils of our community are not to be found in such matters. They are evils beside which these are trumpery. In this eighteenth century it was otherwise. It was the men ruling the country, or at least having its ear, who were the gamblers and libertines. The Duke of Grafton and Lord Sandwich were important politicians. Charles Fox was the most reckless prodigal of his age. Even matched with our own delinquents, not with our statesmen, these sinners were dreadful. Two years ago there was a great scandal in London because a young man lost ten thousand pounds at a club playing ecarte, but when Fox and Fitzpatrick held their faro bank at Brooks's, the now so impressively respectable Brooks's, such losses were daily or nightly events. Ah, well, I'm a socialist, and am far from setting up this old English society as an ideal state of things. Yet it was not in itself more harmful than many a ring of respectable plutocrats now, and that it had an agreeable tone, an ironical, tolerant, life-loving tone, all its letters show, not only those of intellectual connoisseurs of life, like Horace Walpole, but those of all the casual sporting men and women who wrote to George Selwyn. It was, of course, the wig branch of it over which her grace of Devonshire presided, a more charming hostess, one imagines, and then a little later wig society found in the imperious Lady Holland. One of her closest intimates was Charles Fox himself, and that alliance must have been pleasant indeed to watch. Charles with his heavy frame and his big featured swore the face, lit up with that indescribably gay twinkle of fun and good temper his best portrait shows us, and she, blonde and arch, and eager what would not one give to listen to them. She came of a clever and spirited family. Her cousin and friend was the Lady Diana who was divorced by the second Lord Bollingbrook, the bully of the Selwyn Letters, and married Topham Beau Clark, Dr. Johnson's strangely chosen companion, the Lady Diana who was so clever at drawing cupids. She was loved at home, and there is a touching anecdote told by Roxall of her sister Lady Bessbara's grief for her death. So we picture her, gay, clever, a little spoiled perhaps, marrying at 17, the fifth Duke of Devonshire. She is a lovely girl, wrote Horace Walpole, natural and full of grace. He, the first match in England. And what was he besides? Calm. That is the note struck in the account of him beyond all others. A noble man, Roxall describes him, whose constitutional apathy formed his distinguishing characteristic. His figure was tall and manly, though not animated or graceful. His manners always calm and unruffled. He seemed to be incapable of any strong emotion and destitute of all energy or activity of mind. This apathy, it would seem, did not yield to the charms of conversation in Devonshire House. The Duke, to rouse himself, had to repair to Brooks's, and play at Wisp Dorfero. It is agreeable to know, however, that he possessed a highly improved understanding and was regarded as an infallible referee at Brooks's, where there was any dispute about passages in the Roman poets or historians. What place in our day combines gambling with discussions on the Roman poets? He possessed also the hereditary probity characteristic of the family of Cavendish, which perhaps was made a little easier by the more than comfortable circumstances also characteristic of that family. George IV passed a severe judgment on him, in his famous criticism, of the way in which people had come forward to be invested with the garter, saying that the Duke of Devonshire advanced up to the sovereign with his phlegmatic cold awkward air like a clown. We may as well take the more complimentary view and believe that he was simply calm, but even so it seems a figure of somewhat excessive calmness, and it is almost a relief to learn that beneath all this apathy he was not insensible to the seduction of female charms. It might be supposed that a woman so active and emotional as his Duchess would not be happily joined to a man normally so unruffled and roused only by cards and female charms, which unfortunately it seems were not necessarily those of his wife, and we might look for scandal. Happily, however, these contrasting temperaments not infrequently agree well enough, and it is not on record that the Duke's calm was unpleasantly ruffled by his wife. That she was wild and inclined to be dissipated is true. There is a letter from Lady Sarah Bunbury in which the writer laments the Duchess's preposterous hours, but there is no hint in it of the mistake into which Lady Sarah herself, alas, was soon to fall. She played cards, of course, like all her world, but the play does not seem to have been serious enough to keep the Duke at home, or perhaps he preferred masculine methods at the card table. Also, if we may believe the writer of a second letter to the Duchess of Devonshire, a pamphlet which the curious will find in the British Museum, she sometimes made undesirable acquaintances. It must have been agreeable to have such kind and intimate things printed and published about one as this. I am disposed to think, nay, I have very substantial reasons for thinking, that your grace places an unreserved confidence in persons whom the Duke of Devonshire does not approve and from whom Lady Spencer has in vain endeavoured to separate you. But I think we need gather only that even this Duchess of Devonshire did not please everybody. While curious, by the way, are in the British Museum, they might ask also for a poem of the period called The Duchess of Devonshire's Cow, and admire the appalling insipidity from which the print of no age is free. I trust the censor, quoted above, did not allude to Dr. Johnson. I have seen the Duchess of Devonshire, writes Roxxall again, then in the first bloom of youth hanging on the sentences that falls from Johnson's lips, and contending for the nearest place to his chair. Is there any man of letters on whose sentences Duchess is hang now? If there be, I doubt he is not so sound as Dr. Johnson. Let us remember when we think of this lady and her friends, that their homage to genius was not a mere fashion that they read and understood and thought. It is a quality which we may surely set against much else that they did unwisely. As the English aristocracy has been gradually commercialised, its sport has been continued with enthusiasm, but its culture has sadly fallen away. As for vices, they were never very difficult to learn. It is a pleasant side to this Duchess who had far more of manner, politeness and gentle quiet than Fanny Burney had expected in so dashing a great lady. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, is chiefly remembered now as the prototype of Lady Canvases for her exertions in behalf of Charles Fox in the Westminster election of 1784. When the Piccadilly beauty had done her work, the butchers and the bakers, the grocers' undertakers, the milliners and toymen, all vote for Carlo Kahn. She entered, the Cornwallis correspondence tells us, some of the most blaggard houses in the Long Acre, and as we all know, but I am not afraid of being hackneyed, bought Steele the Butcher's vote with a kiss. She had then one of the finest compliments ever paid a woman when an Irish mechanic exclaimed, I could light my pipe at her eyes. Which, madame, would you like best, that or the famous compliment which Steele, not the Butcher, but Dick Steele, paid another woman, would you rather a pipe could be lit at your eyes, or that to love you were a liberal education? I wonder. Four years earlier, in the Gordon Riots, she had to flee from Devonshire House to Lord Clements in Barkley Square, where she slept in the drawing-room on a sofa, or small tent-bed. She died in 1806, and Charles Fox said they had lost the kindest heart in England. There is nothing, I think, to be added about the calm duke, except that he married again, the Elizabeth Duchess of Devonshire, about whose portrait by Gainsborough there was a fuss some years ago. She let Byron his house in Piccadilly, and I regret to say had some difficulty in getting the rent paid. So Clarendon House, with nothing to its memory, but the story of a fall, is gone, and Devonshire House, the scene of a thousand great festivals, the home of important dukes in an unfailing line, stands still, lordly and prosperous. Yet I doubt if any ghost, but one, comes from its gates and haunts Piccadilly with an interest for us, so arresting as that of the beaten-old statesman, whom we may picture in some solitary night, sitting somewhere in Albemarle Street, where his garden was, in his gout-wheel chair, looking disconsolently. Which of those calm, unruffled dukes appeals to us now? They had character, for the most part, to stand well with their contemporaries, and sense not to fling away the gifts, which by accident of birth were theirs. A worthy and impressive line, it cannot fascinate our imagination. One gracious and fair ghost comes out of Devonshire House and rewards our homage with a smile. I am sure, if she goes his way, and sees poor Clarendon in his wheelchair, she says something kind to him. Another contrast of neighbours, eighty-one and eighty-two. I would not weary the reader with contrasts, but when, side by side, with only the width of Bolton Street between them, there stand two houses in Piccadilly, of which one is most famous as a ruinous gambling club, and the other as a scene of blameless lionising, with Thomas Carlisle for the chief king of beasts. Why, then, I cannot help myself. Captain Gronaire, whose reminiscence is no lover of gossip about great names, and no student of strange differences in manners should miss reading, gives the following account of Waitier's Club. He says that some members of Whites and Brookses were dining with the Prince Regent, and were asked by him what sort of dinners they got at their clubs. They grumbled, of course, as members of clubs are wont to grumble, and Sir Thomas Stepney told him that their dinners were always the same. The eternal joints or beef steaks, the boiled fowl with oyster sauce, and an apple tart. This is what we have, sir, at our clubs, and very monotonous fare it is. The Prince, without further remark, continues Gronaire, no doubt he was too deeply moved to speak, rang the bell for his cook, Whatier, and in the presence of those who died at the royal table, asked him whether he would take a house and organise a dinner club. Whatier assented, and named Madison the Prince's Page, Manager, and Labaurie the Cook, from the Royal Kitchen. Note, the usual accounts, by the way, speak of Waitier's Club as one originally established in 1807 by Lord Headford and other young men for musical concerts, but it can hardly have been Waitier's before the advent of the Prince's Cook. End note. Hence the famous Waitier's Club, where the dinners were exquisite, the best Parisian cooks could not beat Labaurie, and where Captain Gronaire had the happiness of frequently seeing his Royal Highness the Duke of York, and hence, alas, many tears, for the play was terrible, and in a few years had ruined most of the members, among them the Prince of all dandies. George Brummel was made Perpetual President of the Club. One cannot say that justice has never been done to Brummel. Is there not Barbé de Revilles Classic du Dondisme et de George Brummel? But, in English at least, he has more often been written about in a slighting manner, which seems to me to show little judgment of character. It is absurd to suppose that Brummel, whose grandfather let lodgings in Berry Street achieved his position in the English society of that time by phoppery and impudence. It is possible that to strive and care for such a position is hardly the mark of a great mind. That is another question. The point is that it was most difficult to achieve, and that Brummel achieved it. True that the best of English society has seldom been superficially exclusive, but it did not in the early 19th century open its doors to men of no birth, merely because they knocked at them in smart clothes. Also, it is one thing to dine with or visit a society and another to lay down laws for it and be really intimate with its governing members. Even after Brummel had been cut by the regent, he continued to stay with his brother the Duke of York at Oatlands and was the friend of the Duchess till her death. The Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana herself, Erskine, Sheridan, Fitzpatrick, note Charles Fox's greatest friend, end note, William Lamb, afterwards the prime minister, Lord Melbourne and Byron all wrote verses for Brummel's album, which is quite a different thing from his writing in theirs. Beyond doubt, he was a popular leader of the society he lived in. He did not achieve this by phoppery. Brummel's phoppery indeed consisted merely in a quite artistic effort to improve the ugly dress of his time and in seeking something of grace and elegance in the common things men used. The regent was his enthusiastic pupil in these matters and was forever trying his bulky person in coats designed by Mr. Brummel and executed by Mr. Weston of Old Bond Street, the artist whom Mr. Brummel favored. Alas, as the delightful captain tells us, the hours of meditative agony which each dedicated to the odious fashions of the day have left no monument save the colored caricatures in which these illustrious persons have appeared. But Brummel's ideal of dress was never extravagant, rather was it a sort of finished simplicity. Exquisite propriety was Byron's phrase for it and his leading maxim, fresh linen and plenty of it, might be commended to the sternest of rationalists. Nor did he gain his position by impudence, impudent he was on occasion, no doubt, with that sort of comical self-exaggeration or emphasis of the foibles accredited to him, which has been the gay humor characteristic of other posers on the surface. Irishman as a rule, and I cannot help thinking that nobody who had not Irish blood in him could push folly with a serious face as did Brummel now and then. Only a man's enemies or two intensely Saxon people call that kind of humor effrontery. As for a different sort of impudence, the sort of the famous Who's your fat friend? Given the circumstances I call that courage and the kind of practical wit. Brummel was handsome. He broke his nose being thrown from his horse at Brighton while his regiment, the Tenth Hazzars, was being reviewed. But that did not signify. Handsome and well-made and with an address that commended him to women. At Eaton he was an admirable Crichton, apparently both a wet bob and a dry bob, the best scholar, the best boatman, the best cricketer, and laid there the foundation of his social success. He was a man of taste in other things than dress, could sing and draw, dance beautifully, and write agreeable verses. Recorded jokes of another age are always stupid and Brummel's are no exception. Real wit that endures, cut and dried, is rare. I am happy to have known some of the wittiest people of my time and don't remember half a dozen jokes that were worth writing down. It is always the manner, the humour of the occasion, the right touch of folly that makes one's merriment. It is little against the wit of another age that we who were not there cannot laugh at it, and it is certain that George Brummel had the essentials of good company. Beyond all that, however, I think we must credit him with some genuine force of character and a sense of perspective and values which kept his head steady wherein others might have been easily turned. I grant the triviality of the ambition to which these qualities were applied, yet I cannot imagine Brummel as the ordinary aspiring snob rather would I say that he collected dukes and duchesses as he collected snuff-boxes, and there's a difference. Certainly he had character. Lady Hester Stanhope, she who led that strange life in the East, a woman of independent judgment and the last person to be influenced by fashion and phoppery, wrote that the man was no fool, and I should like to see him again. Brummel died mad as we know, and it is likely that his affliction was coming on him before his ruin in London. The recklessness of his latter course there looks like it, and it is quite possible that when his saner balance was gone the gay mock assertiveness became bare impudence. And the wit buffoonery. He was ruined at weight years in the same year that saw Byron's voluntary but inevitable banishment. Scrope Davies, the buck and man about town who was Byron's intimate, had this letter from him at the last. My dear Scrope, lend me two hundred pounds. The banks are shut, and all my money is in the three percents. It shall be repaid tomorrow morning. Yours, George Brummel. And Scrope Davies answered, My dear George, it is very unfortunate, but all my money is in the three percents. Yours, S. Davies. One is disposed to like Scrope Davies because he stuck to Byron with Hobhouse, Lady Jersey, and very few more in the time of the scandal, but the heartlessness of that note offends taste as much as sentiment, and one remembers that even in Byron's case many stories of absurdities came from this same Scrope Davies. The two most famous stories about Brummel illustrate the uncertainty of such traditions. There is that about his telling the regents to ring the bell, and the Prince is doing so and ordering his guests' carriage. He denied it, and Jesse in his life gives the explanation that being asked at Carlton House by the Prince to ring the bell and being deep in talk with Lord Moira at the moment, he said without thinking, Your Royal Highness is close to it, whereupon the easily enraged Prince rang the bell and ordered Brummel's carriage, but was placated by Lord Moira. Captain Gronell, however, gives a different story, which was told him by Sir Arthur Upton, present at the time. The regent heard that Brummel had won twenty thousand pounds from George Drummond, a partner in the famous bank, and turned out for this exploit, playing wist while at whites, and characteristically impressed, asked the bow to dinner. They had quarrelled, but Brummel, I suppose, who was certainly the better gentleman of the two, thought it a reconciliation and went. The Prince's bad blood and bad breeding, I call his great champion, Mr Beerbone's, attention to these phrases, which are mine, not Gronell's, came out in full force. He took advantage of Brummel's growing a little gay with wine to say to the Duke of York, I think we had better order Mr Brummel's carriage before he gets drunk. Both stories, of course, may be true. As for the fat friend anecdote, Jesse says the Prince was walking with Lord Moira and Brummel with Alvanley, but Gronell makes the scene a ball, and the Prince's companion Lady Wooster, in which case, Prinnies Roth is the more intelligible. Poor Brummel, we get a last vivid glimpse of him at Calais in 1830 in the memoirs of Charles Greville, who must have met him often at Oatlands. I found him in his old lodging, dressing some pretty pieces of old furniture in the room, an entire toilet of silver, and a large green macaw perched on the back of a tattered silk chair with faded gilding, and he adds in a phrase of rare eloquence, full of gaiety, impudence, and misery. He was to Sinclaire in the ten years left of his existence to a debtor's prison at Caën, and its asylum of the Bonne-Souvre. God rest him. But if his ghost walks, he shakes his fist at 81 Piccadilly. It is time that we returned there. Byron was a member, as he tells us in his detached thoughts. I liked the dandies. They were always very civil to me. I knew them all more or less, and they made me a member of Waitiers, a superb club at that time, being, I take it, the only literary man, except two others, both men of the world, M and S, in it. He means Thomas Moore and William Spencer, and the passage is a little odd, since to a literary man, Qua that Waitiers could hardly have been a desirable resort. Byron, however, did not play then, nor to any extent. He had given it up since cards replaced dice, and Macau was the game at Waitiers. I was very fond of it when young, that is to say of hazard, for I hate all card games, even Pharaoh, when Macau, or whatever they spell it, was introduced I gave up the whole thing, for I loved and missed the rattle and dash of the box and dice, and the glorious uncertainty not only of good luck or bad luck, but of any luck at all, as one had sometimes to throw often to decide at all. Since one and twenty years of age I played but little, and then never above a hundred or two, or three, which would not have gone far at Waitiers. So it was not all gambling there. Some men, no doubt, went for the good eating, as some went in later years to Crockford's. We hear also of a masquerade given by Waitiers to the Duke of Wellington, and the conquering sovereigns. Wellington and Co, is Byron's irreverent phrase, in 1814. There was a curious representation of this masquerade given at Drury Lane a year later, when some of the Drury Lane Committee, it was run, something as covent garden is now. Byron included, went on the stage among the supers. Waitiers came to an end in 1819. Apparently the members had succeeded in ruining each other. But the association of gambling with 81 Piccadilly was not over, and one great name yet illustrates the house. That is none other than Crockford himself. It is not quite certain, but I believe is almost so, that among other hells in which this financial genius was interested, en route from the fish shop where his fortunes began to the most famous of all English gambling places, in St. James's Street, was one held at 81 Piccadilly. It was a French hazard bank, and the partners cleared £200,000. The use of false dice was charged against them. Indeed actual false dice, said to have been used at 81, were exhibited later in Bond Street. So much for 81 Piccadilly. I know not who lives there now, but I trust that in honour of Waitiers, an occasional game of cards is played on the premises. We cross from the east to the west side of Bolton Street, and come to 82, which was and is Bath House. The original house was built by the Earl of Bath, William Poultony, the statesman of George II's time, Sir Robert Walpole's opponent. His is not a personality of much interest to me, but I am glad he lived in Piccadilly, because by virtue of a quarrel he gives me fair grounds to linger for one brief moment over an old study of mine, John Lord Hervey. Besides, they fought their duel in the Green Park opposite. John Lord Hervey, Baron Hervey of Iquworth, the second title of Lord Bristol, whose eldest son he was, not Lord John Hervey, as inaccurate writers have called him, has left us some of the best memoirs in the language. You must skip the details of politics no longer alive for us, but you have left one of the most real and living pictures of a court and society around it ever penned. He was most intimately of the world he shows us, but by gift of intellect and an ironical temperament could stand apart and take a view of it. Something of a pessimist and with a native scorn of humanity, he offended the sentiment of Thackeray. There is John Hervey with his deadly smile and ghastly painted face. I hate him. I cannot hate people who interest and amuse me so much, and I doubt if he was hateful. A man intellectually and personally for studious in a coarse age is sure to be accused of effeminacy. Hervey married a famous beauty, Molly Lapel, and fought his duel, though he thought it a silly custom, like a man. And as for painting his face, he did it to save his friends the horror of the intense white illness had painted it first. Truly a remarkable family, those eighteenth-century Herveys. God made men, women, and Herveys, as Lady Townsend said. One of them was said by Rumor to be the real father of Horace Walpole. Another was the first husband of the bigamous Duchess of Kingston. There were giants of scandal in those days. And another was the Tom Hervey who printed rude advertisements about his wife, but was so beloved by Dr. Johnson that if you call the dog Hervey, said the doctor, I should love him. I come back with a sigh and an apology to my Lord Bath. Hervey wrote the dedication to a pamphlet attacking him. He replied with another, in which Pope may have found hints for his own epithets for Hervey. Sporus, the Emperor Nero's eunuch, and Lord Fanny. Hervey had no option but to fight him, and a bloodless duel in the Green Park followed, and Lord Bath had only to cross the road to be at home again. The Bering succeeded the Poultonies, and Alexander Bering, the first Lord Ashburton, built the house we know, or at least can see for a moment if we turn up Bolton Street when its gates are open. In 1821 he was, of course, the head of Bering Brothers, so that, with Sir Julius Werner, the present occupant, Bath House does but continue a tradition of successful finance. It is from Harriet, the wife of the second Lord Ashburton, that Bath House has its celebrity. The Lady Ashburton, who there and at the Grange, was the admired hostess of all the literati and illuminati, poets, philosophers, men of science, of her day, or Lady Ashburton's printers, as Lady Jersey, quite sublimely exclusive, preferred to call them. She truly is a gracious presence among the shades of Piccadilly. Her name sounds in a chorus of praise through the letters of the time. A magnanimous and a beautiful soul, said Carlisle and Moncton Milnes, that one hardly knew whether it was the woman or the wit that was so charming. It is provoking of Charles Greville to have dropped his acid into this cup, to have left us his opinion that she was capricious and quarrelsome. Let us be sure that their quarrel was his fault. He had the grace to admit her goodness when she was dead. Lady Ashburton's ghost has a right to walk in Piccadilly, but I am doubtful about her society of geniuses. It was on the whole so sure that the wisdom of all the ages had flowered in it, so convinced of the golden time of progress, so truly respectable and really good, that I doubt it would frighten away some other shades we have met, and still more, some of whom later on I shall remind you. That is, it ought to frighten them, but I fear they would be stubborn, have their point of view and hold their ground. No, Tennyson and Carlisle and Mrs. Carlisle, and Bishop Wilberforce do not belong to Piccadilly. More peaceful spaces, less worldly memories, are theirs. Chapter 4 Old Q If one wanted to fix, among the eminent figures of our history, on a presiding genius for Piccadilly, one might wish, in a soft and gracious mood, to choose the Duchess Georgiana, or if one wanted a worldwide name that left a deep mark on England and Europe, one might think of the Duke of Wellington. One might wish, and one might think, but one would have to fix on Old Q. He is there by right of familiarity and inveterate tradition. Old Q's is altogether too strong a case, and in fact over some less lovely aspects of Piccadilly, Old Q's is quite the proper spirit to preside. Devonshire House and Apsley House must give way to Number 138. Footnote and 139. They were one house in his day. The famous outside stairs to the first floor, and the lift for his senile convenience, being at 138. It was at 139. Then, 13, Piccadilly Terrace, Lord Byron lived. End footnote. Half a century ago there were scores of Londoners living who remembered the figure of him, as he sat on a balcony of the house close to Hyde Park Corner, a parasol in his hand, if the sun was hot. Intent on observation, since he could no longer act, up to the last moment of his life, a ruined monument of such open license as London could never see again. From the middle of the 18th century, until ten years after its close, first as Lord March and Raglan, and after 1778, when he succeeded his cousin, husband of priors Kitty Beautiful and Young, as Duke of Queensbury, he stood high, admired or offending, against the gaze of the world. It is only fair to state, however, that in the prime of life his conduct was not more scandalous than that of many contemporaries. Horace Walpole was afraid he had scandalised his neighbourhood by harboring Lord March and The Reiner, the Italian singer, who was his mistress at the time. But then, Strawberry Hill was a quiet and decorous place. Lord Sandwich, the Duke of Grafton, the Second Lord Bollingbrook, and many others were quite as open in their unblessed amours in London and at Newmarket. Old Q's excessive reputation came merely from his continuing these manners into a generation which saw no other exemplars of them. Nor was he a man of uniquely extravagant passions at all. Many men in all ages and countries have led and lead essentially the same life. Only no man of any position in this country has led it openly since he died. Monster for monster, for example, we may find a worse in the Lord Hartford, who was the regent's friend. Red Herrings, the original of Thackeray's stain and Disraelia's Montfort, and who married Old Q's daughter, Mie Mie. A bad man? An immoral man, this Old Q, no doubt was, but I do not think his memory calls for any special effort of denunciation on my part. I much prefer the elegant deprecation of Sir Nathaniel Raxall. Unfortunately, his sources of information, he is speaking of the Duke's good judgment. The turf, the drawing-room, the theatre, the great world, were not the most pure, nor the best adapted to impress him with a favourable idea of his own species. That is really the nice way of putting these things. Not profligacy, but racing made him famous as a young man. At this pursuit, he was indefatigable, as the long series of his letters to George Selwyn constantly shows. He is always just come from new market, or is at new market, or going to new market, with the rena or the zamparini, to be sure, but still in a spirit of business. He was a gentleman jockey in his early days, riding his own horses in the matches which were so prominent to part of the racing in these times. He seems to have been generally lucky, but not always. My dear George, I have lost my match and am quite broke, begins a letter, undated, but apparently from new market. He gave up the turf when he succeeded, at 53, to the Queensbury title and estates, but he was still associated with it in the public mind. Two years later, when there was a rumour that he was to marry Lady Henrietta Stanhope, there was a lampoon of him full of puns on his late avocation. Say, jockey lord, adventurous macaroni, so spruce, so old, so dapper, stiff and starch, why quit the amble of thy pacing pony, why on a filly risk the name of March? Ah, think, squire groom, in spite of Pembroke's tits, enabler rider oft has lost his seat. Young should the jockey be who mounts such bits, or he'll be run away with every heat. And so forth, all very hard on a man of 53, who was to live another thirty years. Betting, of course, went on in this sporting set all day. They bet about most things, but their favourite subjects, as any one who has read the betting-book at Whites or Brooks, will remember, were marriage and death. One would bet that a number of his friends would all be married before him, or dead is cautiously inserted in one such bet, or that old so-and-so would survive another year, and so on. It was about a bet of this last dismal kind that old Q then, Lord March, and a friend, went to law. Lord March bet Mr. Piggot 500 guineas that Sir William Codrington would outlive Mr. Piggot's father. He did, but Mr. Piggot's father was actually dead when the bet was made, though, of course, neither Wagerer knew it, and Mr. Piggot refused to pay, and Lord March sued him before Lord Mansfield in the court of Queen's Bench. In our time, of course, no such action would lie. The case was of great interest to the betting world, and Lord Osary and other eminent sportsmen gave evidence. Mr. Piggot argued that his deceased father was in the position of a horse which had died before the day of a race. The Wager in that case would be invalid, but Lord Mansfield charged the jury otherwise, and poor Piggot lost 500 guineas, costs, father and awe. Precisely when old Q settled in Piccadilly, I have been unable to discover, but certainly by 1767, though perhaps not at 138. Neither precisely do I know when he enacted in the drawing-room there his famous reproduction of the scene on Mount Ida with three of the most beautiful women in London to represent the goddesses in the same dress, so to speak, and himself as Paris to give the apple. As Raxall remarked, it was a scene would have been appropriate to the days of Charles II, though when he marvels at it in the correct days of George III, we marvel also at the epithet. He seemed never to have been really keen about politics, though the details of appointments are frequent in the news parts of his letters. He was a lord of the bedchamber for 28 years, but lost that post in 1788, in consequence of a rare error in judgment. George III was insane, and old Q, after careful inquiries among the doctors, with the caution of an old sportsman, thought it safe to bet on his not recovering, so he had conferences with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York in Piccadilly, regaling them, we are told, with plentiful drafts of champagne, and finally went over to the side of the Prince and Fox, but George III did recover, and the Duke was dismissed. That seems to have been his one personal move in politics, but political interest brought him under the satire of Robert Burns, who seems to have had a virtuous horror for the Duke's Libertine character. Old Q went down to Canvass for the Dumfries-Bergs, and Burns, who was on the other side, let him have it. I'll sing the zeal Drumlanrig bears, who are left the all-important cares of princes and their darlings. On Drumlanrig, the editor of my Burns, has the fourth Duke of Queensbury of infamous memory, which is harsh. Burns' memory is, of course, immaculate, and again the laddies by the banks and east would trust his grace we all, Jamie, but he'll sear them as he sears the king, turn tail and ren away, Jamie. The day he stood his country's friend, or gied her face a claw, Jamie, or fray poor man a blessing won, that day the Duke ne'er saw, Jamie. Wordsworth, by the way, denounced the degenerate Douglas for felling the trees at Dumlanrig. And now for his character, for no man's character is really summed up in calling him a profligate, or saying that his memory is infamous. It was agreed among his friends that from early days this veluptury was remarkable for strong common sense. The letters are full of it, a sort of rough sagacity, and a cynicism that was not of the affected type, a usual green sickness of youth, but the clear-eyed recognition of certain unfortunate facts in the humanity surrounding him. So when George Selwyn, who was rather given to many words about misfortune, wrote to tell him of losing a thousand pounds, he replied, and I quote a little fully, because here certainly the style is the man. When I came home last night, I found your letter on my table. So you have lost a thousand pounds, which you have done twenty times in your lifetime, and won it again as often, and why should not the same thing happen again? I make no doubt that it will. I am sorry, however, that you have lost your money. It is unpleasant. In the meantime, what the devil signify the Lefable de Paris, or the nonsense of whites? You may be sure they will be glad you have lost your money, not because they dislike you, but because they like to laugh. And here is a glimpse of the punishment which comes to every clear-headed sensualist, that sentiment falls away from his emotions. He writes to George of the Zamperini, You see what a situation I am in with my little buffer. She is the prettiest creature that ever was seen. In short, I like her vastly, and she likes me because I give her money. I wish I had never met with her. Because she broke his heart, or anything of that kind? Well, no. Because I should then have been at Paris with you, where I am sure I should have been much happier than I have been here. To be sure, my Lord March was over forty by then, a fact, by the way, which made Sir George Trevelyan, in his life of fox, very rightly angry for these franknesses. But the duke of Queensbury was something more than merely shrewd and cynical. He carried a sense of logic to an extreme point, and applying it to an unusual sphere of human activity, gained thereby a reputation of eccentricity, which was not properly his. There is a logic of the passions, I know, which even commonly is sterner than the logic of the intellect. But this last, which is usually at war with the passions, Old Cue made their active and vigilant servant. He made up his mind that certain pleasures were, for him, the highest good in life, and to have them in abundance, and for the longest possible time he used every means at his disposal, wealth, a great position, and all his faculties, all this calmly, relentlessly, even with a certain scotch-canniness, and with an indifference to the world's opinion so complete that even in an eighteenth-century duke it should gain him some credit for courage. I do not know of any voluptuary in history quite of this distinction in his profession. One or two in the early Roman Empire come to mind, but in them one finds a sort of headstrong savagery, a vulgarity of magnificence, which you may parallel in some of our own millionaires, but not in the duke of Queensbury. He at least was a man of taste, and if you can waive the moral point, a gentleman. At the very last, worn out and diseased, we find him writing an apology to a friend for a passing touch of irritation, an evil type of aristocracy it may be, but at least an authentic aristocrat. Few men indeed, even sensualists, go through life without some softness of feeling, and this one had one real affection for his friend George Selwyn, in letters so curt and businesslike and intolerant of affectation as his, a touch of feeling carries its truth with it. In the letter about the thousand pounds, from which I have quoted, after saying that he would put it right at the bank, and there will be no bankruptcy without we are both ruined at the same time. This, remember, was long before Lord March came into his kingdom, in days when he himself could be quite broke. He goes on, How can you think, my dear George, and I hope you do not think, that anybody or anything can make a tracassery between you and me? I take it ill that you can even talk of it, which you do in the letter I had by Ligonier. I must be the poorest creature upon earth, after having known you so long and always as the best and sincerest friend that anyone ever had, if anyone alive can make any impression upon me where you are concerned. I told you, in a letter I wrote some time ago, that I depended more upon the continuance of our friendship than anything else in the world, which I certainly do, because I have so many reasons to know you, and I am sure I know myself. He could make this last statement with more truth than most of us. But sensualists Hardin and the Reverend Dr. Warner found him many years later, most unfeeling on the subject of Mie Mie. The reader, I do not doubt, knows all about Mie Mie, but perhaps he will forgive me if, in the interest of scientific thoroughness, I tell him an oft-told tale. Mie Mie was the daughter of the Marchesa Fagnani, and George Selwyn, who loved all children, conceived for her a devotion which touched and amused and slightly bored his friends. Gossips of that day and later have said it was doubtful whether he himself or the Duke of Queensbury was her real father. I think, however, that nobody who knows the world and reads the Selwyn correspondence can doubt that George could not have believed he was her father, and that whoever it was in fact, and let us hope it was the Marchesa Fagnani after all, he and the Duke too believed it was his friend. Letters from Warner to Selwyn assume the parentage of old Q. Well, Selwyn wanted the child to be given up to him, to adopt her, and Madame Fagnani refused, and half accepted, and refused again, and led poor George a cruel dance over Europe, in his pathetic and slightly ridiculous quest. In all this, old Q, who certainly professed no parental interest in the child, was sympathetic, though his common sense could not but be in arms. And he pointed out that the more eager George showed himself, the more Madame Fagnani, a capricious woman who thought herself a neglected beauty, would torment him. Also, that he, the Duke, was the last person who profitably could interfere. However, when George at last succeeded, and the child was given up to him, the Duke began a little to poo-poo his friend's excessive tenderness, and the fuss that was made over Mie Mie. Dr. Warner used to call on him in Piccadilly with accounts of her progress, and was indignant at his want of tenderness. Warner, by the way, was a good man, strangely maligned by Thackeray, who said he was a parasite, and licked old Q's boots, whereas he said plainly he disliked old Q, and only frequented him to oblige Selwyn, for whom it is quite clear he had a sincere regard. Warner's letters are by far the wittiest in the whole collection. Well, and how does Mie Mie go on, asked the Duke, and Warner expatiated on her talents, in the fond hope to please him, and said she was learning everything. She will be praised for what the child of a poor person would be punished. Such sort of education is all nonsense, and so on. In this I detect an unwillingness on the Duke's part to let the reverend Dr. Warner assume too much. Another time George had written from the country to Warner about the little flannel petticoat Mie Mie was wearing, and Warner read the letter to old Q, with which he ought to have been pleased, but which he treated with a piss or a dam. Dr. Warner was severe on him for this levity. I have many acquaintance, said he, in an humblest sphere of life, with as much information, with as strong sense, and as far as appears to me, with abundantly more amiable qualities of the heart than his grace of Queensbury. Well, I am fond of children, and am not a wicked Duke, but I confess that if my mourning avocations were interrupted by clergymen reading letters about little flannel petticoats, even my own daughters, I might piss, too. Selwyn and Warner expected too much of a voluptury. Old Q, however, left Mie Mie a fortune, and that brings me betimes, since I grow garrulous, to the end. George Selwyn and all his old friends were long dead. He was blind of an eye and deaf of an ear, toothless and infirm. For his estates in Scotland he had never cared. Amesbury in Wiltshire, a place of most beautiful surroundings, he had ceased to visit. Even his villa at Richmond, where he had grown tired of the Thames with its flow, flow, flow, he had given up. Piccadilly was his home, and there he sat in the sun under his parasol. But this old man, much over eighty, was still keen to see life, still ready to talk if he could not hear. Never did any man, says Raxall, who saw him much in these days, retain more animation or manifest a sounder judgment. Even his figure, though emaciated, still remained elegant. His manners were noble and polished. His conversation gay, always entertaining, generally original, rarely instructive, frequently libertine, indicating a strong, sagacious masculine intellect with a thorough knowledge of man. And the statesman, Wyndham, notes in his diary, two years before old Q's death, how he went in to the Duke of Queensbury, whom I saw at his window, full of life but very difficult to communicate with, and greatly declined in bodily powers. There he sat on his balcony, and the world saw him as it went by, and moralized over him. Lee Hunt, for example, often saw him there, and wondered at the longevity of his dissipation and the prosperity of his worthlessness. Many tales of him went about. They said he took baths of milk, and quite a prejudice against drinking milk arose in the neighbourhood. It seems to be true that he kept a groom, Jack Radford, ready-mounted to follow ladies whose appearance interested him, as he looked down on Piccadilly. There he sat, with his neat parook, and his strong-featured, lively, sharp old face. It seemed as though he would sit there for ever, but at last in 1810, at the age of 86, he died, and was buried under the altar in St. James's Church, Piccadilly, with its various bequests to favourites, caused much more sensation than that of Mr. Cecil Rhodes. The Star of Piccadilly, as a rhyme of the day called him, was set. Not used by the earliest tenants of the chambers, and it becomes a writer who gossips about them to respect their custom. We need not linger over-match on the history of the building. There were originally three houses on the site, and the most eastern of them was occupied by the Third Lord Sunderland. Son of that arch-traitor, whose elaborate disloyalty to James II is one of the darker studies in the psychology of politics. He bought the other two houses and made one of the three, with a fine room for a finer library now at Blenheim. Stephen Fox, the Second Lord Holland, lived here afterwards, who was like his brother Charles in most things saved genius, fat, good-natured, fond of cards and a bottle. It was the birth of a son to him that brought the Jews upon poor Charles, no longer next heir to the large family fortune. Ill-gotten by their father, who speculated with the country's money, in his possession as paymaster, on his knowledge as a minister. By no means an unamiable ghost to collogue with all on a quiet night. Stephen Fox, a little breathless with bulkiness and good living, crossing Piccadilly where his house was to haunt Brooks's in St. James's Street. He sold it to the First Lord Melbourne, who rebuilt it with a ballroom ceiling by Kipriani, and then changed houses with the Duke of York and Albany, son of George II, and hence the name. It was turned into chambers for bachelors, the garden being built over for more profit in 1804. There is a rare and unaffected dignity about Albany still. The courtyard and the house do much to shut out the railway station noises of contemporary Piccadilly, and Vigo Street at the other end is tolerably quiet, so that it is possible to muse there, even in the daytime. Walking through the arcade with its low roof, I have often agreed with Macaulay's remark when he went to live there, that it was a college life in the west end of London, that is to say for Macaulay and for me, if I were rich enough to live in Albany. Other famous tenants have led lives there not possible in colleges, if ancient tales say true, nor wrong those holy men. Many an interesting man has lived in Albany, one of the most attractive of them all to me, and one who more than most of the others may be supposed to haunt Piccadilly is Matt Lewis, the monk, and since his fame is something dimmed now, I will treat him with some circumstance. Most of us, as we grow older, abandon any feud we may have had or been thought to have with Mrs. Grundy. Now and then, however, I still feel a stir of my young dislike of her exploits, and it is an attraction for me in poor Matt Lewis, that he was notable among Mrs. Grundy's victims. Matthew Gregory Lewis was born in 1775, the son of a rich man, and was sent to Westminster and Christchurch, and after that to Weimar and Paris. He plunged into writing early, and had written poems, a novel, a comedy, all by 17 and all forgotten. He was an attaché at the Hague in 1794, and there he wrote his most famous work, now almost forgotten, Ambrosio or the Monk, which was ultimately to destroy him socially. At first, however, it made him fashionable, very fashionable, and that precisely was what Matt Lewis, a harmless, vain, good-natured creature, most wished to be. A literary lion in society, he was a fashionable lion among authors. It was a great event for an aspiring author to be presented to Matt Lewis, as we know from the confession of one of them, namely, who do you think it was? Walter Scott. Of all the revenges of time in the matter of authorship, I think this one of the oddest, that Walter Scott was proud to know Matt Lewis, and to receive his quite good-natured patronage. Matt was bringing out his Tales of Wonder, and Erskine told him that one Walter Scott, a young advocate in Edinburgh, had translated some stirring things from the German. A correspondence followed, and later Matt went down to Edinburgh and asked Scott to dinner, and Scott confessed, with the utter absence of conceit native to that noble character, confessed thirty years later, that he had never felt such elation before. He had seen burns when he was seventeen, and this was the first poet he had seen since. Poor Matt! So Matt Lewis was a lion in the literary world, and the fashionable, enjoying it vastly, being, as Scott says, fonder of great people than he ought to have been, either as a man of talent or as a man of fashion. He had always dukes and duchesses in his mouth, and was pathetically fond of any one that had a title. You would have sworn he had been a parvenu of yesterday, yet he had lived all his life in good society. Byron, too, has a story of Lewis crying at Oatlands, because the Duchess of York had said something so kind to him. Never mind Lewis, don't cry, she could not mean it, said a brutal listener. Matt was also a boar. A good man, says Byron, a clever man, but a boar, a damned boar, one may say. Scott tells us, and it is something for a man's memory that it is kept alive, so far as it is so, by Scott and Byron, of Charles Fox in his later days, very fat and lethargic, enduring an attack from Lewis, lying like a fat ox, which for some time endures the persecution of a buzzing fly, rather than rise to get rid of it, and then at last he got up and heavily plodded his way to the other side of the room. Yet this absurd little snob and boar was the kindest creature alive, sharing his income with his mother, who was separated from his father, and when his father enraged cut it down by half, sharing that and doing good by stealth. Imagination he had, not of a broad and sweeping kind, fantastic, weird, rather morbid, but yet imagination, and after all the hobgoblin terrors which seemed childish to us, struck a serious note for those days. Clever, too, was Matt Lewis, and a man of taste, with a notable ear for rhythm. We can see him in Albany, K-1, in his glory, an extremely small and boyish figure, the least man I ever saw to be strictly well and neatly made, says Scott, with queer eyes, which projected like those of some insect, and were flatish in their orbit. He had the panels of his bookcase filled with looking-glasses, and kept a black servant. It was cruel and wanton in Mrs. Grundy to persecute this harmless little personage, with his snobbery and tediousness, and projecting eyes and kindly heart, cruel because, for a clever man, he must have felt it so bitterly, and wanton because she really could not have cared. Mathias, in the pursuits of literature, attacked his famous book The Monk on the Score of Blasphemy and Indecency, and Mrs. Grundy, who had never read it, but had exalted Lewis on the strength of its brilliant reputation, took alarm. There was a fierce outcry against Matt, and injunction was moved for against his book, and oh, dear, oh, dear, young ladies, says the invaluable Captain Cronow, were forbidden to speak to him. The Monk, one remembers, though a wealthy, was not a marrying man, and conceivably the matrons had a spite against him. It was all very like Mrs. Grundy, but it was hard in her to do it to Matt Lewis, who so loved her smiles. Perhaps the Monk was embittered by this treatment, or perhaps he hated Sheridan anyhow, but his verses on Sheridan were not characteristic of his good nature. For worst abuse of finest parts was misa-fill begotten. There might indeed be blacker hearts, but none could be more rossen. I am sure it was not because Sheridan had scored off him about his play Castle Spectre. A fine name, is it not, replying to Matt's offer to bet on some occasion what Sheridan owed him for it as manager, that he never made large bet, but would bet him what it was worth. Matt's kindliness, however, coexisted with some capacity for quarrelling, and indeed one commonly finds the two qualities together. He who never quarrels is apt to be a little cold-blooded or so, and not much given to active benevolence. Lord Melbourne told Charles Greville an odd tale of the Monk's quarrel with Sir Henry Lushington. It was convenient to Matt to stay with Lushington and his sister at Naples, so he wrote to suspend the quarrel, and after the visit wrote to resume it the status quo antepatch him, and did so with rather more acharnement than before. There is a suggestion of character in this, I think, of something solid below the folly and vanity. The Monk's father died in 1812, leaving plantations in the West Indies with a Matt's journeyed in 1815. He made Byron a parting present of some preserved ginger, which his affectionate friend said he could never eat without tears it was so hot. He visited Byron at Venice on his return, and went riding with the poet by the Brenta, the greater and absent-minded poet leading the way, the lesser and short-sighted poet following, into a ditch and into the river, and into collision with the diligence, but all the time talking without intermission, for he was a man of many words. On an expedition with Walter Scott poor Matt grew weary and had to be carried in his shooting array of a close sky-blue jacket and the brightest red pantaloons I ever saw on a human breach, he also had a kind of feather in his cap. This dear ridiculous creature went again to Jamaica in 1817 with the characteristic intention of improving the condition of the slaves, and died on the voyage home of Yellow Fever. They buried his body at sea, but his spirit must have gone on to England, and stayed a while in Albany, K1, with the mirror-paneled bookcases. It is strange that this sham great author, with his bubble reputation of a day, should be yet alive for us, not pilloried by some pope, but gently and affectionately recorded and pictured by two authentic giants of his trade. I would give many a sugarcane, Monk Lewis were alive again, said Byron, and I would pay my share, added Scott. They are gone to him now, and one fancies their ghosts in Piccadilly, stumping with the limp both had in life, smiling protectingly, and this absurd little figure wonderfully dressed, strutting garrulous between them. Another vanished memory so far as work of his own is concerned is that of Henry Luttrel, who lived in I5, but Albany and Piccadilly seem to belong more to our social than our literary history, and from no gossip that has to do with the social side of his time can Henry Luttrel be omitted, yet there is little to say of him now. Where are the snows of yesteryear one may ask of dead wits almost as surely as of dead beauties? Luttrel was a great wit of his day, the first half or so of the nineteenth century, and one meets him in memoirs far more respectfully noticed than poor Matt Lewis. He was one of those men unhappily less frequently met now than then, who are of real and definite account in the society of their day, for purely social merits, without position or money, or a mob acclaimed repute. He was the author, it is true, of the Letters to Julia, which had a fashionable vogue, and were a guarantee of mental parts in the eyes of his contemporaries, but his reputation could not have endured long on this one achievement. By birth he was illegitimate, a son of Lord Carr Hampton. His means were slender, and he had no political importance. Luttrel owed his social position simply to his social qualities. He was agreeable, a good talker, and had a fund of sound sense at the service of his friends. He and Samuel Rogers hunted in couples. It was said they were seldom seen apart, but that when they were, either abused the other. But if he abused Sam Rogers, he abused no one else. His wit was said to be as kind as the banker poets was malignant. It is a pleasant memory to have left behind one. Pity it should be faded. Greater men, of course, than Matt Lewis or Henry Luttrel, have lived in Albany. Of Byron I shall write elsewhere. Bull were littered afterwards, lived in Byron's rooms. A, too, as no doubt he was delighted to live. You can picture him, if you like, putting on the stays which so greatly annoyed Tennyson, and otherwise making the most of himself. Other men, too, whose names mean something. But either I do not see their ghosts in Piccadilly, or I have nothing to say of them in this sort of light narration. It is clearly impossible, however, to pass over Thomas Babbington Macaulay. I do not pretend to believe personally, for a moment, that Macaulay's ghost wastes time in haunting any scene of his labour on earth. Wherever he is, I am sure he is talking hard or writing earnestly for the instruction of his companions, and has no leisure to muse on the accidents of his past. He is ready to furnish, I am sure, the exact and complete dates of his residence in Albany—the amount of his rent, it was ninety pounds, by the way, if you care to know—and a vigorous analysis of its advantages and defects. You cannot expect any hovering from this matter-of-fact intelligence, and your illusion of his presence must be entirely subjective. Still, if you like to imagine him in Albany, it is easy to do so. We know the furniture of his sitting-room in E1 when he went to live there in 1840. He had, Sir George Trevelyan tells us, half a dozen fine engravings from his favourite great masters, a handsome French clock provided with a singularly melodious set of chimes, the gift of his friend and publisher, Mr. Thomas Longman, and the well-known bronze statuettes of Voltaire and Rousseau, neither of them heroes of his own, which had been presented to him by Lady Holland as a remembrance of her husband. And we can imagine the historian himself seated at his desk amid these agreeable surroundings, a short stout man with a homely face and a fine forehead. There he wrote the first two volumes of his history, and there he got for them the twenty thousand pounds at which later historians marvel and weep. We can imagine him further in his dressing-room, making clumsy efforts to tie his neck-cloth and trying to shave with an unskillful hand, since these physical peculiarities are recorded of him. Completing his toilet and looking round his apartment, he reflected with pleasure on the college life in the West End of London, to which I have already referred, and also I quote from the same letter of his, to the fact that it was in a situation which no younger son of a duke would be ashamed to put on his card. It was rather a trivial reflection for a philosopher, but the greatest of us have our trivial moments. Perhaps it is best, however, to imagine Macaulay at one of his famous breakfasts. There he sits, and if you have the critical temper of Mr. Charles Greville, you would notice that his voice was unmusical and monotonous, and his face heavy and dull, with nothing about him, in fact, to bespeak the genius and learning within. But much evidence of the genius and learning would have been given you had you really been there. Any subject you mentioned your host would know all about, and tell all about, until someone who might take liberties like Lady Holland would say it was enough, when he would stop, as one replaces a book on the shelf, and take down another. If you put a question to him, while the conversation was general, he would wait for a pause, and then repeat it, and give his answer to the table. That, at least, was Mrs. Brookfield's experience. Presently, if you were lucky, you would enjoy one of his brilliant flashes of silence, as Sidney Smith called them. One of Macaulay's breakfasts is described by the late Duke of Argyle. It is pleasing to know that so very cocksurer a personage as Macaulay was admired by the Duke, who was not diffident. It was a day of table turning, and they tried the experiment with a heavy table. Macaulay poo-pooed the idea, but for all that the table had the temerity to turn violently. Did anyone give it a push? Was the question put to each guest by the host? One of them was Bishop Wilberforce, soapy Sam, renowned for saying the comforting thing, and so when all the rest had denied, he admitted that he might have unconsciously given a slight push. It would have been quite insufficient for the effect, but Macaulay's great mind was relieved, a scene for an observer of comic character. I notice with regret that I have not written of Macaulay so genially as I am wont to write. His personality does not attract me, I fear, and then he was a partisan in history, and in my own little reading I inclined to be a partisan on the other side. Well, we all have our prejudices, and Macaulay's memory can afford mine. Besides, as I said, I am in no fear of meeting his ghost.