Manchester Square is of later date. It was an open space approached by shady lanes from Cavendish Square for some fifty years after that was built. The houses in Manchester Square were not begun till 1776--some ten years after the commencement of Portman Square. This district was all very semi-rural and unfinished until much later. Southey, in a letter, writes of Portman Square as “on the outskirts of the town,” and approached “on one side by a road, unlit, unpaved, and inaccessible by carriages.” The large corner house, now occupied by Lord Portman, was built for Mrs. Montagu, “Queen of the Blue Stockings,” and during her time “Montagu House” was the salon to which the literary celebrities of the day flocked. When Mrs. Montagu moved there from Hill Street she wrote to a friend, “My health has not been interrupted by the bad weather we have had; I believe Portman Square is the Montpellier of England.” In the centre of the Square garden was planted a “wilderness,” after the fashion of the day, and early in the nineteenth century, when the Turkish Ambassador resided in the Square, he erected a kiosk in this “wilderness,” where he used to smoke and imagine himself in a perfumed garden of the East. It is still one of the best kept-up of the squares. Berkeley Square dates from nearly the same time as Grosvenor, having been begun in 1698, on the site of the extensive gardens of Berkeley House, which John Evelyn so much admired, and where flourished the holly hedges of which he advised the planting. The central statue here was one by Beaupré and Wilton of George III., which was removed in 1827, and the base of the statue made into a summer-house. In the place of the usual statesman, a drinking fountain, with a figure pouring the water--the gift of the Marquess of Lansdowne--has been placed outside the rails at the southern end. The plane trees are very fine, and were planted at the end of the eighteenth century, it is said, by Mr. Edward Bouverie in 1789. The plane has been so long grown in London these cannot be said with certainty to be the oldest, as is so often stated. Some in Lincoln’s Inn Fields are decidedly larger. In 1722 Fairchild writes in praise of the plane trees, about 40 feet high, in the churchyard of St. Dunstan-in-the-East. Loudon mentions one at the Physic Garden, planted by Philip Miller, which was 115 feet high in 1837 (a western Plane--not the great oriental Plane which fell down a few years ago). The western Plane (_Platinus occidentalis_) was introduced to this country many years after the eastern Plane (_Platinus orientalis_). The tree most common in town is a variety of eastern Plane called _accrifolia_, known as the “London Plane”: this must have been a good deal planted all through the eighteenth century, so it is difficult to assign to any actual tree the priority.