The visitor to St. James's passes up the great staircase, which has been trodden by the feet of so many generations, bound on such different errands. Here and there, from a picture-frame high up on the wall, a painted face looks down immovably on the comings and goings below. The Guard-room has a few stands of glittering arms and one or two women's portraits; altogether a different Guard-room from what it must have been when it received its name. Beyond is the Armoury, where arms bristle in sheaves and piles, surmounted by hauberks and casques, smooth and polished as if they had never been dinted in battle or rusted with blood. Queen Anne's Drawing-room, spacious and stately, is resplendent in yellow satin. Old St. James's has sustained a recent renovation, its faded gorgeousness has been renewed, not without a difficult compromise between the unhesitating magnificence of the past and the subdued taste of the present day. The compromise is honourable to the taste of the decorator, for there is no stinting of rich effect, stinting which would have been out of place, in the great doors, picked out and embossed, the elaborately devised and wrought walls and ceilings, the huge chandeliers, &c. But warm, deep crimson is relieved by cool pale green, and sage wainscot meets the dull red of feathery leaves on other walls. The Queen's Closet, which misses its meaning when it is called a boudoir, with the steel-like embroidery on its walls, matching the grey blue of its cut velvet hangings, recalls the natural pauses in a busy life, when the Queen awaits the call of public duty, or withdraws for a breathing space from the pressure of fatiguing obligations. In more than one of the principal rooms there are low brass screens or railings drawn across the room, to be used as barricades; and the uninitiated hears with due respect that behind those the ambassadors are supposed to congregate, while these fence the approach to the throne. In spite of such precautions, large Drawing-rooms became latterly hard-pressed crowds struggling to make their way, and the State-rooms of Buckingham Palace were put in request as affording better facilities for these ceremonies.