ACROSS THE HALL, DORCHESTER HOUSE.
allowed to remain in a mutilated state, the nose having dropped off. There is another by Dalou, of yet more artistic pretension, behind the Royal Exchange in the City. It represents a fleshly woman, wrought in marble, who is busy with the old maternal office of suckling her child, oddly suggestive to the wayfarer who is slaking his thirst below. As one passes it, it recalls the facetious W. S. Gilbert’s pathetic chorus in “Iolanthe”:—
“Had that refreshment been denied
Then your Strephon must have died.”
The ingenious artist, a refugee, I believe, in the Commune days, introduced the school of Carpeaux among us, but did not receive the full patronage he merited. One of these most terrible combinations is that temple in the Sanctuary at Westminster—a mixture of mosaics, marble, and metal, ever grimy and slimy and squalid. There is, however, one artistic work, in Berkeley Square, well worthy the attention of amateurs. This, a graceful female figure, represented as pouring the water from a vase—the work of a well-known sculptor, Munro. But the statue is rather decayed and what marble could stand our weather? By-and-by the features, fingers, etc., will drop away.
Park Lane, with its stately mansions and choice collection of noble owners, is a charming thoroughfare, and suggests, a little, portions of the Champs Elysées. The houses on the whole are poor and old-fashioned, ingeniously altered and shaped to modern use, with a ludicrous disproportion to the enormous sums paid for them, and which is in truth paid for the situation. It will be noticed what shifts are resorted to to gain room and make the most of the precious ground, the “areas,” as they may be called, being generally covered in and turned into kitchens, over which a garden is laid out. In foreign countries, palaces, or noblemen’s “hôtels,” would be reared on each site. Here is the Earl of Dudley’s bright, smiling mansion,[3] with a colonnade and verandahs, with those of the Marquis of Londonderry, the Duke of Westminster, and other grand seigneurs. An amusing work might be made, setting out the stories of these houses and their tenants, and no doubt there is at this moment some Greville or Raikes, busy putting down notes and anecdotes.
One of the finest and most architectural mansions in London is the Italian villa of Mr. Holford, Dorchester House, to be found here. This elegantly designed structure is favoured by its situation on a “tongue” of land, and is enriched internally by some splendid monumental chimney-pieces, the work of the accomplished but ill-fated Steevens, whose story we shall relate further on.
Returning into Piccadilly, a few doors from the Duke of Cambridge’s mansion, Gloucester House, we note a curious arrangement, a sort of landing in front of a doorway, with a green door, like that of a cupboard, on a level with the street. This was associated with “Old Q,” the famous old roué, the Duke of Queensberry, whose house it was. This disreputable person lived to a vast age, till he could not walk, when a machine was devised that let him down, Bath-chair and all, to the street; and this cupboard contained the apparatus.[4] Another arrangement was the keeping a servant mounted on a pony by the curbstone. At a signal from “Old Q,” when anyone passed that he wished to see and talk with, or wished to know more of, the menial cantered off in pursuit.