[Illustration: FIG. 14. THE WESTERN APPROACH TO PICCADILLY.] Place lived the great Lord Chancellor Eldon. From 139, Piccadilly (Lord Glenesk’s) Lady Byron, after one of her quarrels with the poet, fled with her infant daughter. At Nos. 138 and 139, formerly one building, the Marquis of Queensbury (the notorious “Old Q.”) used, when an octogenarian, to sit at a certain window for hours, and ogle the passing fair sex. Gloucester House adjoining, is the residence of the Duke of Cambridge, occupied, when it was Elgin House, by the Earl of Elgin, who brought over to England the famous marbles that bear his name. Nearly opposite Down Street, on the park side of Piccadilly, stands a curious reminder that once upon a time, parcels and packages of all kinds had to be conveyed all over London, not by train or by Carter Paterson’s speedy vans, but on the shoulders of stalwart porters. It is a “bulk,” replacing an old timber one. A “bulk,” it may be explained, is a kind of shelf supported by two posts at a convenient height for the bearers of burdens to temporarily dispose of them and rest awhile. On the site of No. 106 (the St. James’s Club) was formerly the “Greyhound,” a very old inn, which, with the “White Horse” close by, and the “Half Moon,” a little further on, was a favourite pulling-up place for the numerous carriers, tranters, and market-gardeners who were incessantly coming from the country to town; for Piccadilly was one of London’s great highways westward. In a house (now a club) at the corner of White Horse Street, Sir Walter Scott sometimes stayed when in town. Cambridge House (the Naval and Military Club) recalls Lord Palmerston and the notable political receptions of his accomplished wife. At the corner of Clarges Street, where lived Edmund Kean and also Lady Hamilton, is the Turf Club, and at No. 84 the Imperial Service Club, the last of Piccadilly’s line of clubs that, commencing with The Bachelors’, at the corner of Hamilton Place, forms a kind of approach to the real club-land of St. James’s Street and Pall Mall. Bath House, at the corner of Bolton Street, was the residence of the late millionaire, Baron Hirsch. No. 80, Piccadilly, and No. 1, Stratton Street together form the town house of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and it was from No. 80 that her father, Sir Francis Burdett, M.P., was, in 1810, amidst serious rioting, taken to the Tower for having made use of bad language in the House of Commons. From the roof can be obtained a splendid view of the Westminster and Pimlico district, across the Park, rightly called “Green,” with its beautiful stretches of turf and graceful trees, and far away to the Surrey Hills and the Crystal Palace.