But the historical houses of London are innumerable, and my space is but limited. History is written in many kinds. And the greater portion of the fine houses of the metropolis, the palaces of Mayfair, Pall Mall, Kensington, possess historic interest of their own; interest, indeed, often unknown and unsuspected by any but the privileged few, because unvisited and generally inaccessible. Of these are Chesterfield House, in South Audley Street, the home of the author of the famous _Letters_, where the poor scholar Johnson waited patiently for interviews with his noble patron; Apsley House,--the pillared façade of which is so well known to travellers on the humble omnibus as it passes Hyde Park Corner,--the abode of the "Iron Duke," that old man in the blue coat and white trousers, to the last the people's idol, whose daily appearances, in old age, were here awaited patiently by expectant crowds; Lansdowne House, Devonshire House, Sutherland House, Bridgewater House, splendid mansions on or near the "Green Park," famed, like so many others, for their picture galleries; Sutherland House, often now hospitably thrown open for gatherings of "the people," is said to be the finest private mansion in London: "I have come," a Queen is reported to have said to a former Duchess of Sutherland, "from my house to your palace." Many of the splendid old mansions of Stuart times have, indeed, gone; yet in some instances they have risen again from their ashes to new spheres of interest. Thus, old Montague House in Bloomsbury, old Burlington House in Piccadilly, old Somerset House in the Strand, have been rebuilt and utilised by Government as National Collections or offices. Where lovely ladies of the Restoration trailed their sheeny silks in Lely-like voluptuousness, where court gallants presented odes, and court dandies took snuff and patronage, now sweet girl graduates pace the galleries, spectacled lady-students copy "old masters," Academy pupils study "the antique." The contrast is picturesque as well as strange. Does one not sometimes, as twilight falls, seem to hear the ghostly "swish" of the court beauties' dresses along a deserted British Museum Gallery, or seem to see in a stone Venus, with uplifted arm, an insufficiently clad fair lady of the olden time? It is but fancy, yet such is the charm of history and of historic association.