passages from _Paradise Lost_, and enacting Adam and Eve, in character," belongs, however, not to dingy gardenless Poland Street, but to Hercules Buildings, then a modest Lambeth suburb). In Poland Street, in 1811, lived also Shelley in early youth, with his friend and biographer Hogg; the latter being attracted, says Shelley, by the name of the street, "because it reminded him of Thaddeus of Warsaw and freedom": "A paper (says Hogg) in the window of No. 15 announced lodgings.... 'We must lodge there, should we sleep even on the step of a door.' ... Shelley took some objection to the exterior of the house, but we went in.... There was a back sitting-room on the first floor, somewhat dark but quiet, yet quietness was not the prime attraction. The walls of the room had lately been covered with trellised paper.... This was delightful. He went close to the wall and touched it. 'We must stay here; stay for ever.' Shelley had the bedroom opening out of the sitting room, and this also was overspread with the trellised paper." But every part of London has its historic interest--is, in a sense, a city peopled by the dead. "Where'er you tread is haunted, holy ground." That spot, in that quiet, narrow street,--Mayfair, Bloomsbury, Soho or Westminster,--where you chance to live, and toil, and suffer, and enjoy,--has known many others in its time,--others before you: men in stocks, and wigs, and laced ruffles, and knee-breeches; women in brocades, ruffs, and farthingales; children in long stiff skirts and prim stomachers: who, in their turn, likewise lived, and toiled, and enjoyed, and suffered.... Is it not this romance of London, this mysterious past life of hers, guessed and unguessed, that makes us welcome, and recognise as real friends, the types of a Thackeray, a Dickens? See, for instance, how a mere allusion to Thackeray puppets serves to immortalise with a touch, the prosaic, if fashionable, Clarges and Bond Streets: Clarges Street, "where Beatrix Bernstein held her card parties, her Wednesday and Sunday evenings, save during the short season when Ranelagh was open on a Sunday, where the desolate old woman sat alone, waiting hopelessly for the scapegrace nephew that her battered old heart had learned to love." "Here, Baroness Bernstein takes her chocolate behind the drawn curtains; she is the Beatrix Esmond of brighter days and fortunes.... There are the windows of Harry Warrington's lodgings in Bond Street, 'at the court end of the town;' geraniums and lobelias flourish in them to this day, and no doubt they are let to some sprig of fashion; but to me they are Harry's rooms, hired from Mr. Ruff, the milliner's husband; and the 'Archie' or 'Bertie' in possession to-day is a mere interloper, whom Gumbo would have politely shown downstairs."--(_Byways of Fiction in London._)