It is somewhat anomalous that this “glass of fashion” among streets should have been, so comparatively recently as 1769, connected with such gruesome associations; but it is also equally difficult to imagine it as the dreary, unkept by-way which it was during the Augustan age, when millionaires were not; and the petrol of the motor was not smelt in the road. [Sidenote: GREAT HOUSES OF PARK LANE.] The first of the great mansions we come to is Brook House, which stands at the corner of Upper Brook Street. It was designed by Wyatt, and was for many years the residence of Lord Tweedmouth, and noted for the receptions held here, when the Liberal Party indulged in its revels. A step and we come to Dudley House, built by the late Lord Dudley, and once the casket that contained many of those wonders of art which this most princely of peers loved to gather around him. At the corner of Upper Grosvenor Street stands a sort of magnificent temple dedicated to music and the fine arts. This is the concert or ballroom which the late Duke of Westminster, apparently regardless of architectural symmetry, added to Grosvenor House, which is seen behind it. It reminds me of nothing so much as a beautiful pearl which has succeeded in emerging from the parent shell, but not wholly detaching itself from the parental ligaments. As we have seen, the entrance to Grosvenor House is in Park Street; but I said nothing about the mansion then, because it seems to belong, as does its vast garden extending to Mount Street, to Park Lane. The residence, which was known as Gloucester House, at the time when the Duke of Gloucester, brother of George III., acquired it in 1761, is, of course, one of the great, as differentiated from merely large, houses of London, and it contains a collection of pictures and works of art which a millionaire would have to exhaust his fortune in purchasing, and which could only be adequately described by a Waagen or a Smith. Just beyond South Street stands what I suppose few people, having regard to both its exterior and interior, will deny to be the finest private residence in London--Dorchester House, which was erected by Vulliamy, in the Italian Renaissance style, for the late Mr. Holford. Surrounded as it is by every conceivable kind of architectural experiment, it may be deemed out of place; but, taken by itself, it is a perfect reproduction on a lavish scale of those Italian palaces to which the blue sky of the South forms the one necessary background. The interior is commensurate, both in size and detail, with its commanding exterior, and only the pen of the late Mlle. de la Ramée (“Ouida”) could do justice to the marble staircase. The art collection housed here is extraordinarily fine, while the yearly exhibitions of Old Masters at Burlington House are seldom without one or more examples from among the masterpieces which hang on the walls of Dorchester House.