It may be noted that there are some survivals in London which almost savour of feudal times. All may notice those “bars” which are maintained in certain districts, fashionable, or formerly fashionable, and which are kept strictly select, the guardians severely refusing passage to the heavily-laden waggon or market cart that desires to pass through; none of this class are admitted but have business in the inclosure. This is like one of the nobles’ privileges on the eve of the French Revolution. More strange is it to find that on a certain day in the year His Grace of Bedford closes his “bars” altogether at Gordon Square, Gower Street, and other points of that district, and luggage-laden cabs, making for Euston and King’s Cross, have to get round by circuitous roads as best they can. This is done to keep the right “alive,” but it seems a monstrous thing. Once this private property has been turned into a public street, the privilege of private property should cease, as the inhabitants pay rates for the use of the road.[2] A glimpse of Park Lane, of its strange fountain, is “a sorrow for ever,” painful to the eye in spite of its Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, presided over by the flaming gilt female blowing hard at her trumpet. The last is the peccant part, and were she removed the three poets might look dignified and respectable. Of all ugly things in the metropolis, drinking fountains offer the largest variety. There our professors of deformity revel, and the more pretentious and costly the attempt, the greater hideousness is the result. The idea generally is to produce something imposing and architectural, a sort of temple or building, if possible--ridiculous when it is considered that a little cheap “squirt” of water, dribbling into a basin, is the entire aim and end. You have all the apparatus of a grand “fountain,” only without the gush of water. There is a pretty marble boy’s figure in St. James’s Park, by Jackson, close to Queen Anne’s Gate. For years, however, it has been [Illustration: ACROSS THE HALL, DORCHESTER HOUSE.] allowed to remain in a mutilated state, the nose having dropped off. There is another by Dalou, of yet more artistic pretension, behind the Royal Exchange in the City. It represents a fleshly woman, wrought in marble, who is busy with the old maternal office of suckling her child, oddly suggestive to the wayfarer who is slaking his thirst below. As one passes it, it recalls the facetious W. S. Gilbert’s pathetic chorus in “Iolanthe”:-- “Had that refreshment been denied Then your Strephon must have died.”