ese secluded streets
as of walking into a house in Park Lane or Berkeley Square, to which,
in fact, this population in a great measure belongs. For here reside the
wives of house-stewards and of butlers, in tenements furnished by the
honest savings of their husbands, and let in lodgings to increase their
swelling incomes; here dwells the retired servant, who now devotes
his practised energies to the occasional festival, which, with his
accumulations in the three per cents., or in one of the public-houses of
the quarter, secures him at the same time an easy living, and the casual
enjoyment of that great world which lingers in his memory. 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.' The cawing of the rooks in his
gardens sustains the tone of mind, and Curzon Street, after a long,
straggling, sawney course, ceasing to be a thoroughfare, and losing
itself in the gardens of another palace, is quite in keeping with all
the accessories.

In the night, however, the quarter of which we are speaking is alive.
The manners of the population follow those of their masters. They keep
late hours. The banquet a