The beautiful Mrs. Norton passed many sad and some happy hours of her life in Chesterfield Street, as a neighbour of Lady Becher's, once Miss O'Neill, whose 'beauty, grace, and simplicity was the theme of every tongue.'

At the upper end of Charles Street was the once famous Cosmopolitan Club, too brilliant to last, where Watts painted the splendid picture from a tale of Boccaccio's which now adorns the walls of the Tate Gallery. Alas! it has now become what house agents call a unique residential property, overlooking the garden of Wharncliffe House, where Lord Crewe now lives.

In Seamore Place Lady Blessington commenced her salon of celebrities before she moved to Kensington Gore. Everybody,' it was said, 'goes to Lady Blessington's.' It was here that she began to write the Book of Beauty' and other works which obtained a fleeting notoriety, not for any literary merit, but because Count D'Orsay was a fashionable and profligate dandy, and she, no doubt, a beautiful woman.

In Chesterfield Street lived that miserable dandy, Beau Brummell, and later George Payne-who lost a princely fortune by betting on every occasion and on everything-from the Derby and St. Leger down to which lump of sugar a fly would first settle onwhich drop of rain on a storm-beaten window-pane would first reach the bottom, or which marble would first tumble into the gutter.

Not far from him in Berkeley Square was his friend Admiral Rous, the prince of handicappers, and a few doors off Lord Clarendon, before he migrated to Grosvenor Crescent.

From the portals of Devonshire House must have come forth the beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, conquering and to conquer, to espouse the cause of Charles James Fox at the famous election of Westminster.

In a house, now pulled down, in Piccadilly Lord Byron wrote many of his poems, and there separated for ever from his wife; and next door to him lived Lord Queensberry-' Old Q.' The house where Sir Francis Burdett lived still remains; while from Clarges Street the broken-hearted Lady Hamilton, in the time of her misery after the death of Nelson, wrote many of her pathetic and ill-spelt letters.

Boswell entertained Dr. Johnson in Half Moon Street. In Curzon Street lived Chantrey, the sculptor; talented, wealthy, and childless, he left a large bequest to the Royal Academy for the

encouragement of contemporary art, the distribution of which has lately been much discussed. This generation perhaps knows him best by the brace of woodcock he shot at Holkham in one shot, and immortalised in carving:

Their good and ill from the same source they drew,
Here shrined in marble by the hand that slew.

In Curzon Street No. 8 still remains the house made famous by the salons of the Miss Berrys. Round the corner Lord Chesterfield, in his 'Canonical' home, must have composed his famous letters to his son.

In Chapel Street, which I have hardly yet accustomed myself to calling by its new name of Aldford Street, lived for a short time the poet Shelley, and from a coffee-house in Mount Street, close by, he met and married his poor wife, whom he so soon deserted. The two exiled kings of France, Louis XVIII. and Charles X., lived at different periods in South Audley Street, and close by, in a house overlooking Hyde Park, lived the infamous Philip Egalité, Duke of Orleans. Under the hideous chapel lie buried Lord Chesterfield and the celebrated John Wilkes.

Hill Street recalls the memory of the tall, gaunt figure of Lord Crewe, about whose absence of mind many a story was told. When inquiring after Lord Lansdowne of Mr. James Howard, he called him back and said, 'I mean the present Lord Lansdowne.'

Lord Dudley, Foreign Secretary in Canning's Administration, was commonly called Eccentricity Ward, and had a habit of talking to himself. One day, walking home with an acquaintance, he muttered: This confounded fellow will be expecting me to ask him to dinner, but I won't.' His friend, seeing the humour of the position, said aloud: 'This fellow will be asking me to dinner, but I'm d-d if I'll go.' Lord Dudley quite appreciated the remark, and the two became great friends and often dined in each other's company.

For twenty years Lord Palmerston had a house in Great Stanhope Street, and when there first became Foreign Secretary, in Lord Grey's Administration of 1831; and in a neighbouring drawingroom the great Sir Robert Peel was married to Miss Floyd.

From his house in this street Lord Raglan set forth for the Crimean campaign, and his daughter still lives in a house in Chesterfield Street, which she bought from Alfred Montgomery.

Mayfair has been rich in Lord Chancellors. Lord Hardwicke

lived and died in Grosvenor Square, and Lord Eldon was born at No. 1 Hamilton Place. Here he lived as Lord Chancellor, and had for a neighbour Queen Caroline, who had recently removed from Alderman Wood's house in South Audley Street, and round whose house assembled noisy crowds, cheering, not so much for the Queen as to annoy Lord Eldon.

Lord Cottenham, Lord John Russell's Chancellor, lived, I think, for some time in Park Lane; and many a time I have seen in his yellow barouche Lord Brougham, the idol of contemporaneous caricaturists, come from his house in Grafton Street before he had invented the carriage which now bears his name, which, as Sydney Smith wittily remarked, had a B. outside and a wasp inside.'

In Grosvenor Street, in 1730, died 'the frail, the beautiful, the warm-hearted Mrs. Oldfield.' 'Her ravishing perfections,' as Fielding called them, inspired warm friendship and affection and the worthy love of General Charles Churchill, by whom she had a son, who married Lady Mary Walpole, and so enables me to claim the lovely actress as an ancestress:

Engaging Oldfield, who with grace and ease
Could join the arts to ruin and to please.

Lord Rockingham, a staunch old Whig, the uncompromising advocate of American independence, and Lord Camden, described by Canning as useless lumber,' both lived in Grosvenor Square in days when no house was rented at a higher value than 2001. a year. Lord Derby, on May 1, 1797, six weeks after his first wife's death, married Miss Farren in his house in Grosvenor Square. She had been the rival of Mrs. Abington, and Walpole spoke of her as the most perfect actress he had ever seen. We all know her portrait, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and do not wonder at Mrs. Siddons's description of her as the Comic Muse.

Clubland has absorbed some famous houses in Piccadilly. Cambridge House, the house of Lord and Lady Palmerston, has been turned into the Naval and Military Club, and the St. James's, after some changes in tenantry, occupies the rooms where Madame de Flahault, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte's aide-de-camp, held her salons. It was to this aide-de-camp, Count de Flahault, that Bonaparte, riding away from Waterloo, said, after a long silence, 'Depuis Crécy c'est impossible de vaincre les Anglais.' It is difficult to believe that Count Flahault, who was in the Marengo

campaign in 1800, should have lived to see the disastrous surrender of Sedan.

Mayfair, which has been for so long the centre of the intellect, the gaiety, and the fashion of London, has not altogether been exempt from the tragedies which fall to the lot of mankind. In Mayfair Lord Clive, whose mind was worn out and depressed after all his triumphs and achievements, died by his own hand.

In 1840, at the corner of Norfolk and Green Streets, where Lord Ribblesdale's beautiful Georgian house now stands, a ghastly tragedy was enacted when Lord William Russell was foully murdered by his valet, Courvoisier.

At Lord Harrowby's house in Grosvenor Square a tragedy was contemplated by which all the Ministers of the day were to have been blown up at a Cabinet dinner by a scoundrel called Thistlewood, who was betrayed by one of his fellow-conspirators, and the plan collapsed.

Lord Beaconsfield, after he had left Grosvenor Gate, passed his last days in Curzon Street; and close to him were his faithful friends—in Hertford Street, George Lord Barrington, and in Berkeley Square, Lord Rowton, whose memory, even in these days of rapid oblivion, still lives in many hearts.

It is no wonder that Thackeray, the greatest novelist of the age, laid many of his scenes in the midst of surroundings so attractive, a welcome guest himself at Bath House, where all the literary men would assemble to do homage to Lady Ashburton, who, Carlyle said, was the greatest lady of rank I ever saw, with the soul of a princess and captainess, had there been any career possible for her but that of a fashionable one'; where came Carlyle and Froude, Tennyson and Browning, and Thackeray's great friend, Brookfield, the preacher at St. John's Chapel (already destroyed by the omnivorous builder)—Brookfield, who, as Lord Stanley of Alderley said, quoted Milton and Shakespeare and described the devil as a perfect gentleman; and where the salon of the Miss Berrys in Curzon Street made glad the heart of Thackeray, who says:

A very few years since I knew familiarly a lady who had been asked in marriage by Horace Walpole, who had been patted on the head by George I. This lady had knocked at Dr. Johnson's door; had been intimate with Fox, the beautiful Georgiana of Devonshire, and that brilliant Whig society of the reign of George III.; had known the Duchess of Queensberry, the patroness of Gay and Prior, the admired young beauty of the Court of Queen Anne.

In the undying works of 'Vanity Fair' and 'The Newcomes ' the reader finds himself constantly in Mayfair. Sir Pitt Crawley proposed to Becky Sharp in the dining-room of his sister's house in Park Lane, where Mrs. Firkin and Miss Briggs happened, by a mere coincidence, to be standing at the door, and reported what they had seen to that 'worldly, selfish, graceless, thankless, religionless old woman,' Miss Crawley.

It was in Hamilton Gardens that we first made acquaintance with Ethel Newcome, as a little girl, receiving the announcement of her speedy departure from London.

'What,' she exclaims, will Lord Hercules O'Ryan say when he learns that I have gone into the country?' And the nurse ventures to hint that he will know nothing about it.

'Oh,' says Ethel, he is sure to see it in the newspapers.'

It was in Park Lane that, on a summer morning, Clive was taken by Colonel Newcome to apologise to Barnes Newcome for having thrown a glass of wine in his face the previous evening.

At her father's house Ethel, fast growing into womanhood, lays her fair head on the old soldier's breast, while her younger brother asks him how many people he had killed with the sword that hung by his side.

These happy days before she came out,' and was duly educated by her grandmother, Lady Kew, in the ways of this wicked world of fashion and heartlessness, were times of unalloyed happiness to the old Colonel, Clive, and Ethel.

Here that big Life Guardsman, Rawdon Crawley, was refused admittance to his aunt's house after his marriage, and before his departure for Waterloo, and was called a fool for his pains by the disappointed Becky.

It was in Curzon Street where the unhappy Raggles let his house and supplied vegetables to the Rawdon Crawleys, for which he was never paid, and where they triumphantly showed to a stupid world how to live on nothing a year.'

Lord Steyne at Gaunt House was conveniently near the little house in Curzon Street outside which, on that terrible night, poor Rawdon, just escaped from the spunging-house, saw the windows lit, and, going in, surprised Lord Steyne and Becky.

It was of the chapel pulled down to make way for a huge house overshadowing lodgings and markets that Charles Honeyman, who lived hard by in Walpole Street--a name I cannot trace-wrote to Colonel Newcome: That elegant and commodious chapel

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