At No. 4, the great Duke of Wellington was living in 1814, while yet Apsley House was in the occupation of his brother, the Marquis Wellesley. Others who have lived here include the Earl of Lucan, in 1810, and Lord Grenville, twelve years later. In our own day it has been the town residence of the Earl of Northbrook, the head of the Baring family and some time Governor-General of India.

Mr. Leopold de Rothschild’s beautiful house (No. 5), which looks directly on to the park and has a view up Park Lane, was, from 1810 to 1825, the residence of the Earl of Buckinghamshire, and many years later, of the Marquis Conyngham.

One of London’s rare if not always beautiful statues stands at the junction of Park Lane and Hamilton Place. Utility has been combined with decoration in this case, for it also forms a fountain, presided over by the Muses of Tragedy, Comedy, and History—not Farce, as might have been expected, unless there be some subtly ironical meaning hidden in the otherwise illogical collocation. Above stand, in evident wonderment, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, in marble, and on the summit Fame puffs industriously at her trumpet. Thornycroft was responsible for this work, which was erected in 1875, at the cost of £5,000, the money being provided from the estate of an old lady who died intestate and without heirs.

Before we finally quit Park Lane one or two of its former interesting residents must receive a short word of notice. Thus, at the corner of Upper Grosvenor Street—at that time known as No. 1, Grosvenor Gate—Disraeli was living, from 1839 till 1873; and friend and brother novelist and politician, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, was residing in 1842 at what was known as No. 1 Park Lane, during which period “Zanoni” was published.

The names of Warren Hastings, Richard Sharp, and Lady Palmerston are also connected, cum multis aliis, with this famed street; and in one of those houses which look on to the Lane, but which have their entrances in other streets—in this case Seamore Place—lived the gorgeous Lady Blessington (1832-6), after her departure from St. James’s Square and before her final apotheosis in Kensington Gore. The white-painted semi-circular front of her former residence at the corner of Pitt’s Head Mews, may still be seen; and it will not take a great stretch of the imagination to picture that beautiful and talented woman surrounded by all that extravagance and luxury could suggest, sitting upon its balcony, and penning those short stories, or editing those wonderful “books of beauty,” which formed the fashionable literary pabulum of early Victorian days.

Within a radius of half a mile from Stewart’s corner of Old Bond Street we have traversed that part of the town which is associated pre-eminently with the fashionable, and in a lesser degree with the literary and artistic, traditions of two centuries of London life. Compared with the innumerable memories which its stones evoke, the area covered is a relatively small one, but had space here been less restricted, one might have gone on wandering over acres of paper while setting down the names of persons and places, and lingering over the stories and anecdotes with which they are connected.

INDEX.


FOOTNOTES: