THE MAY FAIR IN 1716.
CHAPTER V.
MAYFAIR.
“Gay mansions with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms—
full of light and music.”—Carlyle, “Sartor Resartus.”
Compared with London as a whole, Mayfair is quite a small quarter; but regarded as a congeries of innumerable streets, and two large squares, it is an extensive and intricate area, and a summer’s day might well be exhausted before we had investigated all the twists and turns of its maze-like complexity.
It is true that its northern half has some sort of method due to Sir Richard Grosvenor’s development of the great Westminster property, of which Grosvenor Square is the key-note; but its southern portion is, with here and there an exception, wanting in logical form, and threatens, I fear, to make the perambulation of it somewhat confusing to those to whom London is a sort of terra incognita.
It will be well to take Grosvenor Square as our starting-point, but before we set out a word must be said about the name, which is generic to the whole area. It almost speaks for itself; and is derived from that “Fair” formerly held here during the first fortnight in May, and dating from the time of James II. Unlike our conception of fairs, however, this one was instituted specifically “for musick, showes, drinking, gaming, raffling, lotteries, stage-plays, and drolls,” and appears to have had nothing to do with the traffic and barter with which we are accustomed to associate these fast disappearing institutions. Nor was it merely the resort of the profanum vulgus; the nobility and gentry, we are told, made a point of frequenting it; and the fields in which it was held,—for then all this part was occupied by meadows and open ground—must have presented a gay appearance, with its booths and shows, surrounded by a brilliantly dressed throng, brought into still greater prominence by the more soberly attired crowd which surrounded it.