in great gold letters, "_Sic Siti Laetantur
Lares_." The household gods might well delight in so fair a spot and in
the music of that "little wilderness full of blackbirds and
nightingales," which the bowl-playing Duke who built the house lovingly
describes to his friend Shrewsbury.

[Sidenote: 1714--Old London]

Most of the streets in the St. James's region bear the names they bore
when King George first came to London. But it is only in name that
they are unchanged. The street of streets, St. James's Street, is
metamorphosed indeed since the days when grotesque signs swung
overhead, and great gilt carriages lumbered up and down from the park,
and the chairs of modish ladies crowded up the narrow thoroughfares.
Splendid warriors, fresh from Flanders or the Rhine, clinked their
courtly swords against the posts; red-coated country gentlemen jostled
their wondering way through the crowd; and the Whig and Tory beaux,
with ruffles and rapiers, powder and perfume, haunted the coffee-houses
of their factions. Not a house of the old street remains as it was
then; not one of the panelled rooms in which minuets were danced by
candle-light to the jingle of harpsichord and tinkle of spinet, where
wits planned pamphlets and pointed epigrams, where statesmen schemed
the overthrow of {67} ministries and even of dynasties, where flushed
youth punted away its fortunes or drank away its senses, and staggered
out, perhaps, through the little crowd of chairmen and link-boys
clustered at the door, to extinguish its foolish flame in a duel at
Leicester Fields. All that world is gone; only the name of the street
remains, as full in its way of memories and associations as the S. P.
Q. R. at the head of a municipal proclamation in modern Rome.

The streets off St. James's Street, too, retain their ancient names,
and nothing more--King Street, Ryder Street, York Street, Jermyn
Street, the spelling of which seems to have puzzled last century
writers greatly, for they wrote it "Jermyn," "Germain," "Germaine," and
even "Germin." St. James's Church, Wren's handiwork, is all that
remains from the age of Anne, with "the steeple," says Strype, fondly,
"lately finished with a fine spire, which adds much splendor to this
end of the town, and also serves as a landmark." Perhaps it sometimes
served as a landmark to Richard Steele, reeling happily to the home in
"Berry" Street, where his beloved Prue awaited him. St. James's Square
has gone thro