“_And now our Brothers Bond Street enter Dear Street of London’s charms the centre._” --LYTTON. [Sidenote: BOND STREET.] Bond Street is really as much the centre of the charms of London to-day, as it was when Lord Lytton wrote the lines quoted above; if by charms we mean fine shops, about which Lord Beaconsfield once waxed eloquent, and a segregation of brilliant humanity; otherwise it is curious that a thoroughfare of such importance should be at once so narrow and so cut up by tributary streets, in some cases, wider than it is itself, which make it crowded and inconvenient to a degree only possible in a City as old and as relatively unchanged in outline as London; for Bond Street, although not of any great age, as we understand the word, would probably be considered by those not so familiar as ourselves with antiquity, as having a decent pedigree, for it dates from 1686, and forms perhaps the most important portion of the scheme of development associated with Sir Thomas Bond. It occupies a part of the site of Clarendon House, and when that mansion with its grounds of 300 acres was purchased by Bond and others, the street was formed. The west side was the first to be built, being then termed Albemarle Buildings, from the Duke of Albemarle who sold Clarendon House to Bond. Hatton described the street in its early days as being “inhabited by the nobility and gentry.” You shall seek long enough to-day before you find members of either class represented among the inhabitants other than occasionally in the various hotels in the street, or perhaps in chambers above the shops, which is but a repetition of what was the custom at an earlier day, when all sorts of illustrious individuals gave as their addresses the upper parts of business premises which, in the absence of numbers to houses and shops, were sufficiently distinctive; thus, when we read of (say) the “Duke of A., at Mr. Jones’s, hairdressers,” we are not to assume that that capillary artist entertained noble guests in his first floor front, other than in the light of lodgers who paid handsomely for the privilege of being in a fashionable street without having to keep up a fashionable house. But, at first, private houses were as much _de rigueur_ in Bond Street as they are in Brook Street or Grosvenor Street to-day, and one of the earliest titled inhabitants was that Duke of St. Albans, the son of Charles II. and Nell Gwynn, whose title would seem to have been a royal afterthought, according to the well-known story, which tells us that, on one occasion, his mother addressed him as “little bastard,” when Charles, who overheard it, remonstrated with her for the use of the term, whereupon Mistress Eleanor, who probably used the ugly word for a sufficiently good reason, replied that the child had no other name. This, apparently, set the King a-thinking, with the result that shortly afterwards, a patent of nobility was made out for the boy.