Towards Knightsbridge we note the two large mansions which flank the entrance to the Park. One of them, long left untenanted, obtained the sobriquet of Gibraltar, because “it was never taken.” Here the once famous speculator Hudson lived, an extraordinary instance of financial reverse and romance. The story of “the Railway King,” as he was called, illustrated the meanness of fashionable life, and there were many tales circulated of the flatteries and homage of great ladies. Forgotten now are the jests that used to circulate as to the sayings and doings of his spouse, whose extraordinary and original “derangement of epitaphs” were better even than those of her famous prototype. This millionaire’s fall was as sudden and rapid as his rise. By a curious coincidence, one of the great houses close by in Grosvenor Place, the one built for the residence of the Marquis of Westminster, but never occupied by him, was tenanted during the French war by another gigantic speculator--Dr. Strousberg, also a Railway King--the crash of whose fall resounded through Europe. The Albert Gate Mansion is now the French Embassy. These two large houses are associated with Lady Morgan in a pleasant way. When she came to live in William Street, about the time of the Coronation, Mr. Cubitt had just taken the Belgravian district in hand, but the road presented a very different aspect from what it does now. There was no entrance to the park here, nor was it needed, as no one wanted to enter, save Lady Morgan herself--with her a good reason. There was the great Cannon Brewery, with a smoking chimney; public-houses, too, galore, as indeed there are now; such are true Tories, and never move or change. “I must have a new gate,” she declared, “where the ‘Fox and Bull’ pothouse now stands. There is a rural air over the whole that is pretty. What I want is a gate where the old sewer tap now moulders, and flanks a ditch of filth and infection. A sort of little rustic bridge should be over it, which would not be without its picturesque effect.” Lord Duncannon, of the “Woods and Forests,” was appealed to, but declined to grant the favour, on the ground of the block at Hyde Park Corner--“It would not be desirable to establish another thoroughfare near it.” What an amusing book could be written on the sapient reasons offered by public men for not undertaking schemes, commencing with Lord Palmerston’s wise prophecy as to the Suez Canal!