Statesmen and doctors, musicians and painters, have all in the past helped to give an interest to Brook Street, which to-day must chiefly rely on its fashionable residents, with here and there a stray politician, for what of interest it may be said to possess. It is still undoubtedly a fine street, and not a few of its houses help to carry us back to past days. Once Edmund Burke lived in it, at what is now No. 72. The great Handel’s spinet may have been heard through the open windows of No. 57 as he tried, shall we say, the exquisite air from “Rinaldo,” or gave the finishing touches to that “Water music” which was to charm (if his ears ever could be charmed by sweet sounds) his gracious Majesty King George II. We had better not intrude too curiously into the workshop of genius, or we might receive a shock, if we found its master not intent on some inspired number from the “Messiah,” but spoiling one of his few books (a presentation copy, perchance, and oh! the feelings of the author), with fingers greasy with muffins, or indulging in one of his gargantuan feasts at which he alone was “de gompany.” It would be like coming upon the great Beethoven, not in the throes of the Ninth Symphony, or the “Waldstein”; but hurling cups and saucers at his terrified maidservant! Not far from Handel’s lodgings (on the wall of which, by the bye, a tablet reposes) a painter, and an engraver plied their quieter arts and laboured in their “unregarded hours,” for here both Gerard Vandergucht and his artist son Benjamin lived, and here were finished, with infinite pains, those engravings in which the elder man reproduced the refinement of Vandyck and the strength of Dobson. Thomas Barker (Barker of Bath, as he is termed) also painted in Brook Street; and the healing-art has been represented here by such medical names to conjure disease with as Jenner and Gull, Williams, Savory, and Broadbent. Sir Charles Bell, who died here in 1832, and Lord Davey, who happily is still with us, represent science; and Lord Lake, one of the famous of those, who, as Carlyle put it, “get their living by being killed”--the art of war. Dear old Mrs. Delany, who was always young, and yet makes us think of her as always old and charming, lived here; and Sydney Smith, with whom we are for ever meeting (never too often, however), cut his jokes, (in which was often hidden so much genial philosophy), in Brook Street, among innumerable other places in London; while readers of “Dombey and Son” will remember that Cousin Feenix’s “dull and dreary” residence was in this fashionable thoroughfare. Claridge’s Hotel is in Brook Street, as most people know; but it looks very different to-day to what it must have done when the father of “Little Dorrit” stayed there on his return from the Continent. [Sidenote: GROSVENOR STREET.]