group of great houses. The roads and back
ways of Mayfair and all about St. James's again, albeit perhaps of a
later growth in point of time, were of the very spirit and architectural
texture of the Bladesover passages and yards; they had the same smells,
the space, the large cleanest and always going to and fro where one
met unmistakable Olympians and even more unmistakable valets, butlers,
footmen in mufti. There were moments when I seemed to glimpse down areas
the white panelling, the very chintz of my mother's room again.

I could trace out now on a map what I would call the Great-House region;
passing south-westward into Belgravia, becoming diffused and sporadic
westward, finding its last systematic outbreak round and about Regent's
Park. The Duke of Devonshire's place in Piccadilly, in all its insolent
ugliness, pleases me particularly; it is the quintessence of the thing;
Apsley House is all in the manner of my theory, Park Lane has its quite
typical mansions, and they run along the border of the Green Park and
St. James's. And I struck out a truth one day in Cromwell Road quite
suddenly, as I looked over the Natural History Museum "By Jove," said I
"but this is the little assemblage of cases of stuffed birds and
animals upon the Bladesover staircase grown enormous, and yonder as the
corresponding thing to the Bladesover curios and porcelain is the Art
Museume and there in the little observatories in Exhibition Road is old
Sir Cuthbert's Gregorian telescope that I hunted out in the storeroom
and put together." And diving into the Art Museum under this
inspiration, I came to a little reading-room and found as I had
inferred, old brown books!

It was really a good piece of social comparative anatomy I did that
day; all these museums and libraries that are dotted over London between
Piccadilly and West Kensington, and indeed the museum and library
movement throughout the world, sprang from the elegant leisure of the
gentlemen of taste. Theirs were the first libraries, the first houses
of culture; by my rat-like raids into the Bladesover saloon I became,
as it were, the last dwindled representative of such a man of letters
as Swift. But now these things have escaped out of the Great House
altogether, and taken on a strange independent life of their own.

It is this idea of escaping parts from the seventeenth century system of
Bladesover, of proliferating and overgrowing elements from the Estates,
that to this day s