London is so big " place—or to express its nature more correctly there are so many different Londons—that although " good many people have been "discovering " it, and for © good many years now, the mine is practically inexhaustible. But it is surprising that no one before Mr. G. S. Street. should have had the idea which inspires his charming book Ghosts ut Piccadilly—to take the houses of that wonderful and indefinable street, whether they are still there, like the home of the Cavendishes, or whether they are not there, like the extinct Clarendon House of Charles I's ill-fated Lord Chancellor, and to fill their rooms with the great people who once danced and postured and gambled therein, or aired themselves in the street without before the eyes of a not always admiring public. Perhaps the reason is that one needs " special equipment for such a task. The writer must be both archwologist and novelist. Well, Mr. Street ix both, although he keeps the archwological side carefully in check on the plea that this part of his work has been done by others. More than all else he is a heartfelt lover of Piccadilly himself. Doex he ever willingly take any other walk than that which hex between his rooms in—Street and the Savile Club!
At least he begins to lose interest in his ghoste when they Hit out of Piccadilly. Fortunately he has more than enough him between "No. 1.
(where Wellington kept the iron shutters closed till the day of hin death in memory of "his brief moment of unpopularity when the inal broke his windows for opposing reform in 1831) and the Cireax: and in Mr. Street's mellow, delicately humorous narrative there will be enough for his readers also.
Wellington makes fine picture naturally, trotting slowly up Constitation Hill on his white cob amid the now applauding crowd, to point, sarcasm tically and in perfect'silence, at those barred windows before riding into the courtyard of Apsley House. But Wellington was too rare a genius—how his contemporaries even of his own rank trembled in his presence!—to bs typical of anything except himself and of all the ghosts there are three especially that take our fancy ax representing two extremes of Piccadilly, its aristocratic hospitalities and ite vices, Lord and Lady Palmerston and " Old Q." The Dake of Queensberry has a infamous reputation even to this day, but Mr. Street cannot take this verdict of him unquestioned.
Old Q's excessive reputation (he say+) came merely from his continuing thee manners (the manners which led him to enact in his drawing-room the celebrated representation of the Judgement of Paris) into a generation which saw no other exemplars of them.
No doubt " Old Q.," like the man The Three Little Maids" "led 9 fearful life" In bia old. age he sat upon his balcony at No. 138 and kept 'a footman in readiness to follow up
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.