“_The frolicsome statesman, the man of the day A laughing philosopher, gallant and gay_,” as Locker-Lampson called him. It is said that much of Palmerston’s popularity was due to the splendid functions which took place under Lady Palmerston’s auspices in this fine mansion. At his death there was some idea of pulling down the house to make room for a Roman Catholic Cathedral, but happily the scheme fell to the ground, and the place is, with some additions necessary to the club which occupies it, in practically the same state as when the royal Duke thought aloud in its chambers, or the Prime Minister nonchalantly sauntered through its gates. [Sidenote: OTHER PICCADILLY CLUBS.] Passing the Junior Naval and Military Club at No. 96, the Badminton at No. 100, and the massive buildings of the Junior Constitutional, representing Nos. 101 to 104, Piccadilly, we come to a beautiful house, now the home of the Isthmian Club, which removed here from its premises opposite Berkeley Street, now absorbed by the magnificent Ritz Hotel. This residence, No. 95, was originally known as Barrymore House, having been built in 1780, by Novosielski, for the Earl of Barrymore, on a site once occupied by the workshop of that Van Nost, who was responsible for the statue of George I. formerly in Grosvenor Square. Lord Barrymore was the eldest of those three brothers and one sister, who earned for themselves the unflattering _sobriquets_ of Hellgate, Cripplegate, Newgate, and Billingsgate--the second being in allusion to one of the brothers who was lame, and the last, to the sister whose command of strong language was “extensive and peculiar.” Gambling and general profligacy--by the way “profligate” might have summed up the whole family--brought Lord Barrymore to great distress, and Raikes records in his Diary that when the peer wished to give a dinner, he had perforce--_à la_ Dick Steele--to dress up the bailiffs, who were perpetually in the house, in his own liveries and get them to wait at table! It is hardly surprising to learn that the house was left unfinished at the death of this unsavoury personage, and subsequently Smirke added the porch. After a fire had occurred here--the curious thing being that it did not happen in Barrymore’s lifetime--the place was repaired and opened as the “Old Pulteney Hotel,” and here it was that the Emperor of Russia stayed, when the allied Sovereigns were in this country in 1814. After its day as an hotel, the Marquis of Hertford purchased the house, and greatly improved, but practically never occupied it. This was the third Lord Hertford, who married that Maria Fagniani, about whose paternity George Selwyn and Old Q. could never satisfactorily agree, and who is so largely responsible for the magnificent art collection which Sir Richard Wallace left to the nation.