MAYFAIR AND THE GEORGIANS

The Stately Homes of London Shepherd Market and the Past Gay's "Trivia" Memorial Tablets Mayfair Keith's Chapel Marriage on Easy Terms Curzon Street Shelley and the Lark Literary Associations Berkeley Square The Beaux Dover Street John Murray's Grosvenor Square South Audley Street and Chesterfield House.

OF the vast tracts of wealthy residential streets in Bayswater and Belgravia and South Kensington there is nothing to say, because they are not interesting. They are too new to have a history (I find myself instinctively refusing to loiter in any streets built since Georgian days), and for the most part too regular to compel attention as architecture. But Mayfair is distinct: Mayfair's bricks and stones are eloquent.

Mayfair, whose oldest houses date from the early years of the eighteenth century, strictly speaking, covers only a very small area; but we have come to consider its boundaries Piccadilly on the south, on the north Oxford Street, on the east Bond Street, and on the west Park Lane. Since most of the people who live there have one or more other houses, in England or Scotland, Mayfair out of the season is a very desolate land; but that is all to the good from the point of view of the wanderer. Indeed in August it is like a city of the dead. It is still one of the most difficult districts to learn, and so many are its cols-de-sac often a mews, where horses once stamped but where now motor horns hoot and so capricious are its streets, that one may lose one's way in Mayfair very easily.

In Shepherd Market, just here, which is one of the least modernised parts of London, it is still possible to feel in the eighteenth century. It lies just to the south of Curzon Street, in the democratic way in which in London poor neighbourhoods jostle wealthy ones, and it is a narrow street or two filled with bustling little shops and busy shopkeepers. Many of the houses have hardly been touched since they were built, nor have the manners of the place altered to any serious degree. Gentlemen's gentlemen, such as one meets about here, remain very much the same: the coachmen and butlers and footmen who to-day emerge from the ancient Sun Inn, wiping their mouths, are not, save for costume, very different from those that emerged wiping their mouths from the same inn in the days of Walpole and Charles James Fox. Edward Shepherd, the architect who built Shepherd Market, lived in what is now Crewe House, the very attractive and countrified low white house in its own grounds with a little lodge, opposite the Duke of Marlborough's square white palace.

A thought that is continually coming to mind as one walks about older London and meditates on its past is how modern that past is how recently civilisation as we understand it came upon the, town. Superficially much is changed, but materially nothing. Half an hour spent on the old "Spectator" or "Tatler," or with Walpole's "Letters" or Boswell's "Johnson," shows you that. The London of Gay's "Trivia," that pleasant guide to the art of walking in the streets of this city, is at heart our own London with trifling modifications. The Bully has gone, the Nicker (the gentleman who broke Windows with halfpence) has gone, the fop is no longer offensive with scent, wigs have become approximately a matter of secrecy, and the conditions of life are less simple ; but, Londoners are the same, and always will be, I suppose, and the precincts of St. James still have their milkmaids. It is too late in the day to quote from the poem, but my little edition has an index, and I quote a little from that, partly because it is interesting in itself, and partly because it transforms the reader into his own poet. Here are some entries:

Alley, the pleasure of walking in one,

Bookseller skilled in the weather,

Barber, by whom to be shunned,

Butchers, to be avoided,

Cane, the convenience of one.

Coat, how to chuse one for the winter,

Countryman, perplexed to find the way,

Coachman, his whip dangerous,

Crowd parted by a coach,

Cellar, the misfortunes of falling into one.

Dustman, to whom offensive,

Fop, the ill consequence of passing too near one,

Father, the happiness of a child who knows his own,

Ladies dress neither by reason nor instinct,

Milkman of the city unlike a rural one.

Overton the print seller,

Oyster, the courage of him that first ate one,

Prentices not to be relied on,

Periwigs, how stolen off the head,

Playhouse, a caution when you lead a lady out of it,

Shoes, what most proper for walkers.

Stockings, how to prevent their being spattered,

Schoolboys mischievous in frosty weather.

Umbrella, its use,

Wig, what to be worn in a mist,

Way, of whom to be inquired,

Wall, when to keep it.

From these heads one ought given a knack of rhyme to be able to make a "Trivia" for oneself ; and they show that the London life of Gay's day "Trivia" was published in 1712 was very much what it is now.

THE SHRIMP GIRL,

AFTER THE PICTURE BY HOGARTH IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY

From No. 1 London the best way to Shepherd Market is by Hamilton Place and Hertford Street, or it may be gained from Piccadilly by the narrow White Horse Street. Hertford Street is a street of grave houses where many interesting men and women have lived, only one of whom, however Dr. Jenner, the vaccinator, at No. 14 has a tablet. The erection of tablets in historic London a duty shared by the County Council and the Society of Arts is very capricious, a result partly due to the reluctance of owners or occupiers, to have their walls thus distinguished for gapers. Mayfair, so rich in residents of eminence, has very few tablets. Upon Hertford Street's roll of fame is also Capability Brown, who invented the shrubbery, or at any rate made it his ambition to make shrubberies grow where none had grown before, and was employed on this task, and on the laying out of gardens, by gentlemen all over England. Sheridan lived at No. 10 during four of his more prosperous years, in the house where General Burgoyne (who was also a playwright) died. Bulwer Lytton was at No. 36 in the eighteen-thirties.