Here may be
found his grace's coachman, and here his lordship's groom, who keeps a
book and bleeds periodically too speculative footmen, by betting odds
on his master's horses. But, above all, it is in this district that
the cooks have ever sought a favourite and elegant abode. An air of
stillness and serenity, of exhausted passions and suppressed emotion,
rather than of sluggishness and of dullness, distinguishes this quarter
during the day.
When you turn from the vitality and brightness of Piccadilly, the
park, the palace, the terraced mansions, the sparkling equipages, the
cavaliers cantering up the hill, the swarming multitude, and enter
the region of which we are speaking, the effect is at first almost
unearthly. Not a carriage, not a horseman, scarcely a passenger; there
seems some great and sudden collapse in the metropolitan system, as if
a pest had been announced, or an enemy were expected in alarm by a
vanquished capital. The approach from Curzon Street has not this effect.
Hyde Park has still about it something of Arcadia. There are woods and
waters, and the occasional illusion of an illimitable distance of sylvan
joyance. The spirit is allured to gentle thoughts as we wander in what
is still really a lane, and, turning down Stanhope Street, behold that
house which the great Lord Chesterfield tells us, in one of his letters,
he was 'building among the fields.
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