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 through many metamorphoses since it was first built in 1665, and called the Piazza. In 1714 there was a rectangular enclosure in the centre, with four passages at the sides, through which the public could come and go as they pleased. In a later generation the inhabitants railed the enclosure round, and set in the middle an oval basin of water, large enough to have a boat upon it. In old engravings we see people gravely punting about on the quaint little pond. The fulness of time filled in the pond, and set up King William the Third instead in the middle of a grassy circle. It would take too long to enumerate all the changes that our Georgian gentleman would find in the London of his day. Some few, however, are especially worth recording. He would seek in vain for the "Pikadilly" he knew, with its stately houses and fair gardens.