Up to about 1851, the year of the great Exhibition, Piccadilly was more a fashionable lounge than anything else, but since that time it has completely changed, and from having been a purely West End street has become an ordinary London thoroughfare. No. 22 Arlington Street, now Wimborne House, has had a good many different names as well as occupants. Once it was called Beaufort House, then Hamilton House, then Walsingham House, and now finally, as has been said, Wimborne House. Amongst other remarkable people who have lived there was Lord Houghton, who once took it for a year. It was the interior of this house, it is said, that Hogarth utilised as the scene of the wonderful series illustrating the marriage _à la mode_ of his day. In 1870 Mr. Pender (afterwards Sir John) gave a great party in this mansion to inaugurate the opening of a telegraph cable to India, in those days considered a great feat. Messages, I remember, were sent to the Viceroy during the evening, and congratulatory replies duly received, whilst most of the intellect and rank of London were amongst the guests. The present King and Queen were there, and Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli, and altogether the whole entertainment was a most brilliant one. Just about this time society was beginning to widen out, and the stamp which once used so ruthlessly to hall-mark people as belonging to the _crême de la crême_ or as being outside the pale, to make a more feeble impression. Nevertheless, the great millionaires had not yet made their appearance, and if any one died and left a hundred thousand it was still thought enormous. The ways and things of the ’sixties seem very strange to-day. Oysters were a shilling a dozen, and people used to be made ill by arsenic green wall-paper. The hideous crinoline was universally worn by ladies, and entailed untold inconvenience and discomfort. Old Dr. Fuller of Piccadilly (the last of the apothecaries) was once summoned to dislodge a fish-bone from the throat of Frances Anne, Lady Londonderry, and when imperiously told to begin, was obliged to say that he was quite unable to get within many yards of her ladyship’s throat in consequence of her crinoline being so enormous and so solid!