The Burlington is in Cork street, a select, and fashionable business thoroughfare between Bond street and Regent street. In this immediate locality are also to be found Long’s Hotel, the Bristol, Almond’s Hotel, patronized by Chauncey Depew and his family, and Brown’s Hotel in Dover street. The last-named house affects not to desire American patronage. The Burlington has enjoyed for over a century a truly unique reputation and position in London. The hotel, as seen from the Burlington street side, has a dignified exterior. It was erected in the year 1723, after designs by Kent, by Richard, third earl of Burlington, but the Cork street side was added to the old hotel in 1828.
It contains about one hundred and fifty rooms, and among these are as fine apartments as may be met with in any hotel in the world. The hotel entrance and the staircase are strikingly attractive, and the galleries, opening from the staircase to the first floor, have a most charming effect. Pretty alcoves occupy the ends of the gallery, and on the side opposite to the colonnade, which looks on to the staircase, is a richly ornamented doorway leading to the drawing-rooms. The latter possess curiously decorated ceilings, painted in oil, with vases, birds, foliage, etc., the work of an Italian artist of the eighteenth century.
The bedrooms are also interesting, as they retain their original carved wood mantelpieces and doorways. There are several noble old rooms on the ground floor with tastefully designed mantelpieces, panelling, cornices, doorways and richly painted ceilings, which might have served for the background of one of Hogarth’s pictures.
In the halls are fine, delicately carved benches by Grinling Gibbons. In their time the old frescoes have been admired by many famous celebrities who have sojourned at the Burlington. “Kitty,” the celebrated Countess of Queensberry, friend of Gay, dispensed her well-known hospitality at this hostelry, and Florence Nightingale occupied a suite of apartments there for some months after the Crimean war. Here, too, Macaulay wrote a portion of his famous history.
Coming to more recent times, there is scarcely a well-known face in London that does not know this aristocratic hotel. Lord Beaconsfield, when he was plain “Mr. Disraeli,” was president of a committee which met there weekly for the purpose of erecting a statue to the memory of the late Earl of Derby. The ex-premier, Mr. Gladstone, and his family have patronized the Burlington for the past fifty years. The Marquis of Salisbury may be occasionally passed in the corridors on his way to the royal apartments of King Leopold, and the Prince of Wales arrives unattended to visit august relatives, who patronize the Burlington. Henry Irving gives his delightful dinner parties there, and the Royal College of Physicians have dined there monthly since 1830. Among distinguished Americans whose names are on the books, may be found George Peabody, the philanthropist, who resided there for eight months, also Jefferson Davis, John Jacob Astor, Mr. Bancroft, General Schenck and General Sandford. Henry M. Stanley also is on the cosmopolitan list of celebrated guests of the Burlington.
The Burlington, as well as the Buckingham Palace Hotel, opposite Buckingham Palace, has for many years been managed by Mr. George Cooke, who is one of the proprietors, and under whose administration both hotels have acquired a reputation second to none in Europe. Electric light, new sanitation and every other modern improvement have been introduced, and both the British public, as well as American visitors to London, have been quick to appreciate Mr. Cooke’s effort to make his hotels real London homes for people of taste and refinement.