At No. 3, Madame de Stael stayed when on her visit to this country, and here probably posed as untiringly as we know she did at Lansdowne House. Admiral Hawke once lived at No. 7, and next door, at No. 8, David Mallet, for whom is claimed, in common with James Thomson, the authorship of “Rule Britannia,” which was first written as a lyric in that Masque which the joint authors produced for Frederick, Prince of Wales. Besides Copley, two other artists once resided in George Street; Sir William Beechey and Sir Thomas Phillips; neither perhaps in the first flight, but both untiring wielders of the brush, and in their day successful portrait painters. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s bright eyes and bardolphian face must often have lighted up the street as he listened to the chimes at midnight, at No. 9; and at an earlier day, the somewhat solemn visage of Lord Chancellor Cowper was to be seen here as he passed stately up the steps of No. 13, where his wife may have been penning that valuable diary which has come down to us. The list might be carried on interminably. Only one or two more names, and we must hurry into Hanover Square. The Earl of Albemarle and Lord Stair, of George II.’s day, lived in this street; and in 1762, the witty Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who once, on someone’s hinting that her hands were in need of ablution, replied, “You should see my feet,” and whom Walpole described ungallantly as “always a dirty little thing.” Who else can I pick out? Sir Charles Clarges, in 1726; Colonel Francis Charteris, three years later, and Lord Shelburne, in 1748. These, and how many others, pass by like ghosts and carry us back to “the snows of yesteryear!” [Sidenote: HANOVER SQUARE.] As we look up George Street, the pleasant green oasis of Hanover Square’s central garden faces us, grouped round the great statue of Pitt which Chantry designed, and which was put up in 1831. There is no inscription on the base other than the name and dates of birth and death; but Sydney Smith, for once departing from his usual genial humour, wrote a suggested epitaph for it, so galling and so bitter, that it might have drawn the ghost of the “pilot that weathered the storm” from the shades where such great spirits dwell, and set it wandering with uneasy footsteps round its bronze counterfeit!