Bond Street, if to a lesser degree than some other thoroughfares close by, has always been noted for its hotels, one of the most famous being Long’s, at Nos. 15 and 16, rebuilt and greatly enlarged in 1888, which was patronised by Sir Walter Scott; and here he met Lord Byron for the last time in 1815; and Stevens’s Hotel, two doors off, where Byron was to be met with in the days when he affected to live a fashionable life and consort with the “Dandies.” Stevens’s was at No. 18, and, having been rebuilt in 1888, is now a jewellers’; another hostelry has also disappeared these 30 years--this was the Clarendon Hotel, at No. 169, which occupied the former town residence of the Dukes of Grafton, where at a later time the great Chatham once lived. Old Bond Street, which begins at “Stewart’s Corner,” runs into New Bond Street with nothing to mark their division or to indicate that they form, except in name, anything but one continuous thoroughfare. The latter was not, however, formed till about 30 years after its prototype; but it equals it in interest by reason of the illustrious ones who have dwelt in it. Here, for instance, came in 1727, to lodge with his cousin Lancelot, at a house then described as “over against the Crown and Cushion,” the great Dean of St. Patrick’s, whom we have met with in Piccadilly when he was lodging in Pall Mall or Bury Street; here lived a few years later that most delightful of garrulous memoir-writers, Mrs. Delany, the friend of Fanny Burney and Queen Charlotte and of how many others; Lord Coventry, who married one of the beautiful Gunnings, was here, in 1732; so was Lord Craven and Lord Abergavenny; later still George Selwyn cut his jokes in the street and hurried by this way to many a last scene at Tyburn, not far off in the Oxford Road. Dr. Johnson’s ponderous form might have been seen here, rolling along, as he touched all the posts he passed. Thomson, “who sang the seasons and their change,” and used to lie abed so unconscionable a time o’mornings also lived in New Bond Street, before he flitted to “ambrosial Richmond.” Not only have men of thought and fashion resided here, but men of action, in the persons of Lord Nelson and Sir Thomas Picton, have been represented. The former was staying at No. 147, in 1797, and therewith a curious circumstance is on record. After he had been created Duke of Bronté, he was accustomed to make presents to his friends of casks of Marsala, for which his estates in Sicily were celebrated. Curiously enough, during some excavations next door to Nelson’s one-time residence, a cask of this wine, in a bricked-up cellar, was discovered. So rotten, however, had the cask become, that on exposure to the air it fell to pieces. Southey tells of the following incident which occurred during Nelson’s sojourn here.