week,--and plaguey dear!"? But,--even considering the vast difference in money value since Swift's day,--we have to pay a good deal more than that now for similar accommodation in this quarter. But, yet further West, between Bond Street and Hyde Park, are Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares, the very focus of fashion, in whose neighbourhood rents rise proportionately. Here, too, are many unexpected and charming byways. Behind the vestry in Mount Street, for instance, in the passage that leads into the church in Farm Street, you might think yourself thousands of miles away from Mayfair. This church in Farm Street,--the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception,--is famous as a Jesuit centre; here it was that Henry Manning, afterwards Cardinal, was "received" on Passion Sunday, 1851. Other byways there are, too, of a less attractive kind; the byways where dwell the "poor relations," so to speak, of the Aristocracy and the "Smart Set"; the impoverished ladies whose sense of propriety would lead them to dwell even in a wheelbarrow, could that wheelbarrow only be drawn up on the fashionable side of the street! They are "backmewsy" little streets of saddening aspect, such as Dickens's typical "Mews Street, Grosvenor Square," that contained the residence of Mr. Tite Barnacle, with "squeezed houses," each with "a ramshackle bowed front, little dingy windows, and a little dark area like a damp waistcoat pocket" ... the house a sort of bottle filled with a strong distillation of mews, so that when the footman opened the door, he "seemed to take the stopper out." Dickens's picture is still a portrait that many will recognise: "Mews Street, Grosvenor Square, was not absolutely Grosvenor Square itself, but it was very near it. It was a hideous little street of dead wall, stables, and dunghills, with lofts over coach-houses inhabited by coachmen's families, who had a passion for drying clothes, and decorating their window-sills with miniature turnpike-gates. The principal chimney-sweep of that fashionable quarter lived at the blind end of Mews Street; and the same corner contained an establishment much frequented about early morning and twilight, for the purchase of wine-bottles and kitchen-stuff. Punch's shows used to lean against the dead wall in Mews Street, while their proprietors were dining elsewhere; and the dogs of the neighbourhood made appointments to meet in the same locality. Yet there were two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of Mews Street, which went at enormous rents on account of their being abject hangers-on to a fashionable situation; and whenever one of these fearful little coops was to be let (which seldom happened, for they were in great request), the house agent advertised it as a gentlemanly residence in the most aristocratic part of town, inhabited solely by the élite of the _beau monde_."