Jermyn, Lord Dover (d. 1708), the little Jermyn of De Grammont's Memoirs; Berkeley Street and Stratton Street after John, Lord Berkeley of Stratton, Lord Deputy of Ireland in the reign of Charles II.; Clarges Street after Sir Walter Clarges, the nephew of Ann Clarges, wife of General Monk; and Arlington Street and Bennet Street after Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, one of the Cabal. Air Street was built in 1659; Stratton Street in 1693, and Bolton Street was, in 1708, the most westerly street in London. Devonshire House occupies the site of Berkeley House, in which the first Duke of Devonshire died (1707). Hamilton Place derives its name from James Hamilton, ranger of Hyde Park in the reign of Charles II., and brother of La Belle Hamilton. Halfmoon Street was so called from the Halfmoon Tavern. Coventry House, No. 106, was built on the site of an old inn, called the Greyhound, and bought by the Earl of Coventry of Sir Hugh Hunlock in 1764 for 10,000 guineas. Apsley House was called after Apsley, Earl of Bathurst, who built it late in the last century; and the Albany from the Duke of York and Albany, brother of George IV. St. James's Church (by Wren) was consecrated on Sunday, July 13, 1684. The sexton's book of St. Martin's informs us that the White Bear Inn was in existence in 1685; and Strype, in his new edition of Stow, that there was a White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly in 1720; it was so named by Williams, the landlord, in honour of the accession of the House of Hanover. This house was widely renowned in coaching days, and is still the summer starting-place of the private four-horse stage-coaches. The two Corinthian pilasters, which stood one on each side of the Three Kings Inn gateway, in Piccadilly (they were removed in 1864), belonged to Clarendon House, and were thought to be the only remains of that edifice.

Sir William Petty, our first writer of authority on political arithmetic, died in a house over against St. James's Church (1687). Next but one to Sir William Petty, Verrio, the painter, was living in 1675. In the dark red-brick rectory house, at the north side of the church, pulled down 1848, and immediately rebuilt (now No. 197), lived and died Dr. Samuel Clarke, rector of St. James's, from 1709 till his death in 1729. Here he edited Cæsar and Homer; here he wrote his Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity and his Treatise on the Being and Attributes of God. In Coventry House, facing the Green Park, corner of Engine Street (now the St. James's Club), died in 1809, William, sixth Earl of Coventry, married, in 1752, to Maria, the elder of the two beautiful Miss Gunnings. In what was then No. 23, now No. 99, died, in 1803, Sir William Hamilton, the collector of the. Hamiltonian gems, better known as the husband of Nelson's Lady Hamilton: they went there in 1800. From the house No. 80, Sir Francis Burdett was taken to the Tower, April 6, 1810; the arrest was made by forcing open the area windows, after a fruitless attempt 1 Carter the Antiquary in Gent. Mag. for March 1816, p. 230; Everyday Book, vol. i. p. 578; Selwyn's Correspondence, vol. i. p. 339.

to get in at the first floor by a ladder. They found Sir Francis in the drawing-room with his brother, his son, and some ladies. The coach in which they carried him off was escorted by the Life Guards, with the 5th Hussars leading the way. They went round by Portland Street and the City Road through Finsbury Square and the Minories to the Tower. Windham records in his Diary (p. 503), "Went late to Albemarle Street. Found Life Guards in Piccadilly hunted by and hunting the mob." No. 105 was the old Pulteney Hotel; here the Emperor of Russia put up during the memorable visit of the allied sovereigns in 1814; and here the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg (the Emperor Alexander's sister) introduced Prince Leopold to the Princess Charlotte. On its site the late Marquis of Hertford built, but never occupied, Hertford House. The large brick house, No. I Stratton Street, was the residence of Mrs. Coutts, afterwards Duchess of St. Albans, and is now that of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Lord Eldon's house, at the west corner of Hamilton Place, was built by his grandfather, Lord Chancellor Eldon. Nos. 138 and 139 were all one house

in the old Duke of Queensberry's time.

In the balcony of No. 138, on fine days in summer, used to sit, some forty years ago, a thin, withered old figure, with one eye, looking on all the females that passed him, and not displeased if they returned him whole winks for his single ones. He had been Prince of the Jockies of his time, and was a voluptuary and millionaire. "Old Q." was his popular appellation. He died at the age of eighty-six. We have often seen him in his balcony

Sunning himself in Huncamunca's eyes;

and wondered at the longevity of his dissipation and the prosperity of his worthlessness.-Leigh Hunt.

Windham also mentions his habit of sitting at the window :

:

September 25, 1808.-Went in to the Duke of Queensberry, whom I saw at his window; full of life but very difficult to communicate with, and greatly declined in bodily powers.-Windham's Diary.

He died in this house, December 23, 1810, aged eighty-six. The legacy duty on his property was £120,000.

At the corner of Park Lane, No. 137, then Lord Elgin's, the Elgin marbles were placed on their first arrival in this country. Later it was the residence of the Duchess of Gloucester. No. 94 was formerly Egremont House, then Cholmondeley House, afterwards the residence of the Duke of Cambridge (brother of George III.), and known as Cambridge House. It was then, from his first premiership, 1855, till his death, October 18, 1865, the residence of Lord Palmerston ; and famed for Lady Palmerston's brilliant receptions. It is now the Naval and Military Club. Lord Palmerston, prior to 1855, lived for a short time at No. 114. The bay-fronted house which stood at the corner of Whitehorse Street was the residence of Mr. Charles Dumergue, the friend of Sir Walter Scott; until a child of his own was established in London, this was Scott's headquarters when in town. The London

season of Lord Byron's married life was passed in that half of the Duke of Queensberry's house afterwards numbered 139 and pulled down in 1889. "We mean to metropolise to-morrow," says Byron, "and you will address your next to Piccadilly. We have got the Duchess of Devon's house there, she being in France." Here he brought his wife, March 18, 1815, and that hag of a housemaid, Mrs. Mule, of whom Moore has given an amusing account; and from here Lady Byron left him for ever in the middle of the following January. His affairs were so embarrassed that there had been no fewer than eight or nine executions in his house during this period. The letters of Lord Byron, written from this house, are one and all dated from No. 13 Piccadilly Terrace, and one and all of Scott's from Mr. Dumergue's, No. 15 Piccadilly West. Numbers are of little use to the local antiquary; they suffer from the caprice of the authorities. Two houses are thrown into one, the street is enlarged, or the even numbers are arranged on one side and the odd numbers on the other. Piccadilly Terrace and Piccadilly West no longer exist; and under the present system of numbering, Apsley House, Hyde Park Corner, is No. 149 Piccadilly. The Hercules Pillars public-house, where Squire Western put up his horses when in pursuit of Tom Jones, and where that bluff brave soldier, the Marquis of Granby (d. 1770), spent many a happy hour, stood long after Apsley House was built on what was Hamilton Terrace, now incorporated into Piccadilly. In Piccadilly, on the south side, facing Old Bond Street, was the shop of Wright (the publisher of the Antijacobin, the Baviad, etc.), now Ridgway's (No. 169), where Peter Pindar assaulted Gifford, and was bundled neck and crop into the muddy street for his pains. Peter Pindar, however, never ceased to assert both in print and conversation that he had "cudgelled, most soundly cudgelled" Gifford, in "one Wright's shop, a poor, ignorant and painstaking bookseller in Piccadilly." George Frederick Cooke was living at No. 9 Piccadilly West when, on February 5, 1803, he made a resolve to keep a journal, which he forgot the next day.

At the corner of Down Street was the house of Henry Thomas Hope, Esq., built 1848-1849, from the designs of M. Dusillon and Mr. T. L. Donaldson. The handsome iron railing in front was cast at Paris. The cost of the whole building is said to have been over £80,000. Here Mr. Hope kept the celebrated collection of pictures (Dutch especially) formed at the Hague by the family of the Hopes, and now chiefly at Deepdene. The Junior Athenæum Club purchased the lease for £45,000. At "No. 22 Piccadilly, late the Fantoccini Rooms," Mr. Katterfelto exhibited in 1782 the wonders of his solar microscope, whereby the "insects which have threatened this kingdom with a plague . . . and which by all accounts, caused a great plague in Italy in the year 1432 . . . will be magnified as large as an ox, and are as tough."1

1 Katterfelto's Advertisement.

Pickaxe Street, CLERKENWELL, the name given in some old maps to GoSWELL STREET.

Pickering Place, ST. JAMES'S STREET, a small courtyard near the south-east end of the street. In Dodsley's London, 1761, it is set down as Pickering's Court. The old firm of engravers, through whose house the entrance to the Court passes, have preserved a card-plate of the Georgian era, which, without any name, states "5 Pickering Place, St. James's Street, Rouge and Roulette, French and English Hazard. Commence at one o'clock." This was one of the most notorious Hells in London.

Picket Street, STRAND, north side of St. Clement's Danes. Built on the site of Butcher Row, and so called in compliment to Alderman Picket (d. 1796, buried at Stoke Newington). Before the alteration was made the old cant name for the place among coachmen was "The Pass," or "The Straits of St. Clement's."1 Street was cleared away to make room for the new Law Courts.

Picket

A number of old, ruinous houses called Butcher Row have been taken down, and a range of new buildings erected on the north side, named Picket Street, in honour of Alderman Picket, who projected the alteration.-Priscilla Wakefield's Perambulations in London, 1809, p. 246.

Pickleherring Street, by the Thames Side, HORSLEYDOWN. Here, at the north end of Vine Street, is the landing-place called Pickleherring Stairs.

October 15, 1687.-Mr. Timothy Evans, at Pickleherring Stairs, who had been kind to my son Henry, in bringing him out of the Indies, came to me. He has been commander of merchantmen in to the Indies and Guinea, or mate, this ten years, and brought me four agates; who is desirous I would move Mr. Pepes to him into his Majesty's service.-Bishop Cartwright's Diary, p. 85.

Picthatch, or PICKEHATCH, a noted receptacle for prostitutes and pickpockets, generally supposed to have been in Turnmill Street, near Clerkenwell Green,2 but its position is determined by a grant of the 33d of Queen Elizabeth, and a survey of 1649. What was Picthatch is a street at the back of a narrow turning called Middle Row (formerly Rotten Row) opposite the Charter House wall in Goswell Road. The name is still (or was till recently) preserved in "Pickax Yard" adjoining Middle Row.

In a grant by pat. 33 Eliz., p. 9, m. 25-28, appears the grant of a small enclosure occupied as a garden with a stall stable thereon built, lying in Olde Street or Pickehatch near the Charter House, in the parish of St. Giles's without Cripplegate; and in a survey of the Prebendal Manor of Finsbury (1649) is mentioned, "All that other parcel of demesne land commonly called and known by the name of Rotten Row, set, lying and being in the parish of St. Giles's without Cripplegate, in a certain street there commonly called Old Street, adjoining north upon the said street, and south upon a way or passage leading out of Old Street into the Pickthatch, and abutting east upon the Cage and Prison House in Old Street aforesaid."-T. Edlyne Tomlins (MS. Communication to Mr. Cunningham).

1 The Spectator, No. 498. 2 Gifford's Ben Jonson, vol. i. p. 17; Dyce's Middleton, vol. v. p. 512.

Falstaff [to Pistol.] Reason, you rogue, reason: think'st thou I'll endanger my soul gratis? At a word, hang no more about me; I am no gibbet for you:-go. A short knife and a throng:-to your manor of Pickthatch, go.-Merry Wives of Windsor, Act ii. Sc. 2.

Shift, here in town, not meanest among squires,

That haunt Pict-hatch, Marsh Lambeth and Whitefriars,

Keeps himself, with half a man, and defrays

The charge of that state with this charm-God pays.

Ben Jonson, Epigram xii. (Lieutenant Shift).

Shift, a thread-bare shark; one that never was a soldier, yet lives upon lendings. His profession is skeldring and odling, his bank Paul's, and his warehouse Picthatch. -Ben Jonson, Dram. Pers. before Every Man out of his Humour. See also Every Man in his Humour; and Alchemist.

Here Middleton has laid the scene of his Black Book; and here there is reason to believe, from what Middleton states, Nash, the rude railing satirist, died.

I proceeded toward Pict-hatch, intending to begin there first, which (as I may fitly name it) is the very skirts of all brothel-houses.-Middleton's Works, vol. v. p. 513.

In the meantime, while they were ransacking his box and pockets [Sir John] Robinson fell a railing at the Colonel, giving him the base terms of Rebel and Murderer, and such language as none could have learnt, but such as had been conversant among the Civil Society of Pickt-hatch, Turnbull Street, and Billingsgate. --Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. 1838, p. 132.

Pightle is a small enclosed place, and the root picht, pight seems to convey the idea of a fastening or shutting off. Pickthatch was a place parted off, where the residents were shut in and intruders shut out. It may be worth notice that Southey records in his journal of a journey in the western and south-western countries, under October 29, 1799: "On the way [from Ringwood to Romsey in Hampshire] is the Picket Post, an extra-parochial alehouse, where unmarried women go to lie in, out of the reach of the constable." 1

Pie Corner, WEST SMITHFIELD, between Giltspur Street and Smithfield; now the Smithfield end of Giltspur Street.

Pie Corner, a place so called of such a sign, sometime a fair Inn for receipt of travellers, but now divided into tenements.-Stow, p. 139.

Pye corner-noted chiefly for Cook's Shops, and Pigs drest there during Bartholomew Fair.-Strype, B. iii. p. 283.

Hostess. I am undone by his [Falstaff's] going; I warrant you, he's an infinitive thing upon my score.-Good master Fang, hold him sure :-good master Snare, let him not 'scape. He comes continually to Pie Corner (saving your manhood) to buy a saddle; and he's indited to dinner to the Lubbard's Head in Lumbert Street to Master Smooth's the silkman.-Shakespeare, Second Part of King Henry IV., Act ii. Sc. I.

Face. I shall put you in mind, sir; at Pie Corner

Taking your meal of steam in, from Cook's stalls.

Where, like the father of hunger, you did walk

Piteously costive.-Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, Act i. Sc. 1.

Littlewit. Tut, we'll have a device, a dainty one. I have it, Win, I have it, i' faith, and 'tis a fine one. Win, long to eat of a pig, sweet Win, in the Fair do you

1 Southey's Commonplace Book, vol. iv. p. 523.