Yet, be the actual bricks and mortar never so prosaic, there is a strange fascination about the dwellings where great men have lived and died. Benjamin Disraeli was born, like Ruskin, in the shades of Bloomsbury, and, again like him, migrated, later, to Mayfair on his marriage. The late Lord Beaconsfield remained, however, always faithful to the West End. In his Park Lane house (No. 29) he lived over thirty years; removing then to No. 2, Whitehall Gardens, and finally dying, after a short tenancy, at 19, Curzon Street. It was a cold and inclement spring, a blast of Kingsley's much belauded "north-easter," to which he succumbed. That unassuming house in Curzon Street was, for the moment, the world's centre. "It was half-past six in the morning that the final bulletin of the dying statesman's condition was placed on the railings to inform the crowd who, even at that early hour, waited for intelligence." Mr. Gladstone, too, has had as many London houses as his great rival, with perhaps, stormier residences in them. There is the house, for instance, in Harley Street, where the mob smashed the great man's windows at the time of his unpopularity over the Eastern question. And No. 10, Carlton House Terrace, is the mansion where he lived for so many years at the zenith of his fame. Is his spirit, I wonder, clean vanished, forgotten there, and does no record of him remain? Perhaps the militant spirits of Disraeli and Gladstone still linger, if anywhere, about Downing Street; that narrow street of which Carlyle says that "it is evident to all men that the interests of one hundred and fifty millions of us depend on the mysterious industry there carried on"; and where No. 10, that dingy old house which has been the temporary home of successive Prime Ministers, as well as the official head-quarters of the Government, "focuses more historic glamour than any other house in London." Hook said wittily of Downing Street: "There is a fascination in the air of this little _cul-de-sac_; an hour's inhalation of its atmosphere affects some men with giddiness, others with blindness, and very frequently with the most oblivious boastfulness."