In Regent Street, which had its genesis in the Prince Regent’s desire for a fine thoroughfare between Carlton House and his residence in Regent’s Park, and the making of which did away with as much dirt and squalor as Shaftesbury Avenue has attempted to do in our own day, Nash’s magnificent sweep is now, alas! interrupted by Mr. Norman Shaw’s splendid “Piccadilly Hotel,” the elevation of which shows the design adopted for the rebuilding of the Quadrant. The once famous colonnade has long since disappeared; but in the Haymarket, the Theatre, and Fribourg’s delightful old shop still show what it once looked like. And then with these we have the _dernier cri_ of His Majesty’s Theatre, the Tube railway station, and the roar of the motor ’bus. If we can but escape from these leviathans of the road, let us beat a hasty retreat from beneath Cupid’s bended bow and outstretched leg, and make our way back by Piccadilly to Stewart’s corner, from whence we first started on our perambulation. At the Circus we are nearly on the site of that famous gaming-house, known as Pickadilla Hall, of which the earliest mention appears to have occurred in 1623, when it was in the possession of one Robert Baker, whose widow sold it to that somewhat notorious Colonel Panton, who was associated with Titus Oates, and whose name survives in Panton Street. He it was who built Panton Square, where the Comedy Theatre now stands, in one of the houses of which, in 1762, the Ambassador of Morocco cut off his servant’s head because the latter had displeased his sable Excellency in some trivial matter, with the result that the resentful envoy and his retinue received a sound thrashing from an infuriated mob which got wind of the circumstance. [Sidenote: PICCADILLY EAST.] Even in those early days a good deal of trouble was taken to keep Piccadilly, that is, as far as Sackville Street (for the remaining portion was then known as Portugal Street or the “way to Reading”), well paved, and free from contamination in other ways, as Evelyn’s Diary and Burton’s Parliamentary Journals attest.