It might be thought that in these more peaceful times highwaymen had long been extinct in the West End of London, but such is not the case, for within the last twenty years they reappeared in modern guise in the very centre of Mayfair. One winter’s night in 1889, the French naval _attaché_, who was going home from his club, was set upon in Curzon Street by four men who, after violently assaulting and robbing him, left him senseless upon the ground, where he was discovered by the police a short time afterwards. The assailants in this case were never, I believe, arrested, though the whole affair created a great sensation, occurring as it did in the very centre of a quarter generally considered to be about the safest in London. Peaceful as Berkeley Square is to-day, it came near being a scene of carnage at the time of Lord Liverpool’s ministry, when artillerymen stood there, lighted match in hand, by the side of loaded field-pieces which they were quite prepared to fire. Mount Street also has had a military day, owing its very existence indeed to rumours of battle, for on its site stood a bastion or mount—part of the line of fortifications hastily thrown up to defend the western suburbs of London in 1643, when the Parliament was expecting an attack from the forces of King Charles I. In the centre of Berkeley Square stood, up to comparatively recent times, an equestrian statue of George III. as Marcus Aurelius. This had been erected by the Princess Amelia; it had no particular artistic merit, and was perched upon a very clumsy pedestal. Berkeley Chapel, at the other end of Charles Street, has been but recently demolished; it may not be generally known that at one time the celebrated Sydney Smith was its minister. In after-years this celebrated divine took up his abode in Charles Street, at No. 33. At No. 42 in this old street lived the celebrated and unfortunate dandy “Beau Brummell”—this was about the year 1792; whilst a more intellectual occupant of one of its houses was Bulwer Lytton, in whose house was a room fitted up in exact facsimile of an apartment at Pompeii—everything being in keeping. Charles Street, in all probability, did not derive its name from the Merry Monarch, but from Charles, Earl of Falmouth, brother of the first Lord Berkeley of Stratton. Berkeley Square, though begun about 1698, was not finished till the time when Sir Robert Walpole was Prime Minister; he, indeed, made a note of the last houses being built there. Many distinguished people have lived in this old square—Lord Clive amongst others. It was at a house in Berkeley Square that a butler murdered a certain nobleman, his master—a crime which called forth from George Selwyn the remark: “Good God! What an idea that butler will give the convicts of us when he is sent to Newgate!”