Although these fashionable Squares are so sedulously guarded against the intrusion of outsiders, they are very little used by those who have the right of entrance. "Livery Servants and Dogs not admitted" is a legendary inscription which, in its substance, still operates. Here and there a nurse with a baby in her arms haunts the shade, or a parcel of older children play lawn-tennis or croquet to an accompaniment of chaff from envious street-boys. But, as a general rule, for twenty hours out of the twenty-four and for ten months out of the twelve the Squares are absolutely vacant; and one of the most reasonable reforms which I could conceive would be to convert them from private pleasure-grounds to public gardens, and to throw the cost of maintaining them in order and beauty on the London County Council. As I said before, some Square-owners have, without waiting for legal compulsion, taken tentative steps towards this reform. The Trustees of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the largest and the shadiest of all London Squares, have made them over to the County Council, and, in the hot months of declining summer, the juvenile populations of Holborn and St. Giles play their breathless games where Babington was hanged and Russell beheaded. It was there that, on the 20th of July 1683, Sir Ralph Verney, riding out from London to his home in Buckinghamshire, "saw the scaffold making ready against Lord Russell's execution to-morrow--God help him, and save the country." But if once we leave the utilities and amenities of the London Squares and begin to meddle with their antiquities, we shall soon overflow all reasonable limits. Bloomsbury Square still reeks (at least for those who know their "Barnaby Rudge") with the blood which was shed in the Gordon Riots. Grosvenor Square--the last district of London which clung to oil-lamps in hopeless resistance to the innovation of gas--embodies the more recent memory of the Cato Street Conspiracy. In Berkeley Square (from what is now Lord Rosebery's house) Sarah Child eloped, and annexed the name and the banking-house of Child to the Earldom of Jersey. In Portman Square Mrs. Montagu presided over her court of Bluestockings and feasted the chimney-sweeps on May-day. In Manchester Square, under the roof which now houses the Wallace Collection, the dazzling beauty of Isabella Lady Hertford stirred the fatuous passion of George IV. In Cavendish Square, under the portico of Harcourt House, lately demolished, Disraeli said good-bye for ever to his confederate Lord George Bentinck. In Hanover Square, Chantrey's stately statue of William Pitt has looked down on a century of aristocratic weddings, ascending and descending the steps of St. George's Church. Sir George Trevelyan, commenting on a Valentine written by Macaulay for Lady Mary Stanhope, a great-niece of Pitt's, declares that "the allusion to the statue in Hanover Square is one of the happiest touches that can be