The fate of Devonshire House, as mere structure, remains uncertain, for we are still being treated to instalments of those "actual facts" which are never the facts on which one can depend. But in one heavy sense this fine old mansion is already erased from the map of London (says the "Observer"). It is no longer a ome.
It is its extinction. as_a home that is significant for Piccadilly and the West End, This is but the latest of a series of vanishings of mournful length, which has included in recent years the exits of their Lares and Penates from Stafford House, Crewe House, and Montagu House, to name no others.
Tt may be said that the spacious henie has no moral right to its existence in a London distracted by its growth in population, by its fatigues of transport, and. by the immense new will to live of ts inhabitants. Perhaps not, but homes like Devonshire House were never going to multiply again; and the destruction of the remnant will be the loss of a fine moral ingreclient in West End life. A home of any kind is now) a rare and reviving sight in London's central arteries. In one of the greatest of them I have for years looked up to a high, Uelicately-curtained window, above a gun smith's shop, in which a green parrot looks down "from its cage on the tides of traffic. That window has long expressed a gentle home life; it seems to announce a place of good deeds in a naughty world. When its parrot disappears, a light, will have gone from the street; its very shadow on the blind is a light.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.