have passed away with Carlton House for ever, and in its place we have the flight of stone steps leading to the Park, down which a carriage had once rushed headlong but for Mr. Gladstone’s restraining hand, and a stone Duke of York gazing at the sky.

The Prince Regent, when he became George IV., thought of connecting Carlton House with Marlborough House by a great gallery running the length of Pall Mall, and dedicated to the portraits of the Royal and notable persons of this country. Had he done so, he would have anticipated the National Portrait Gallery of to-day, and built a nobler Valhalla; but Nash was allowed to demolish Carlton House and cover its site with the great mansions and terraces which now stand there.

The Princess Charlotte—the nation’s hope, so untimely cut off—was born at Carlton House, but she is more closely connected with Warwick House, which almost adjoined it on the east side, and stood at the end of Warwick Street, which still exists. The original Warwick House had been the birthplace of that Sir Philip Warwick, whose memoirs of his Royal master, Charles I., are frequently to be met with. When the Princess Charlotte lived here with her governess, Miss Knight, the latter states that the entrance was secured by bars of iron on the inside, and that the Princess was obliged to go through the court of Carlton House. The same lady gives as dreary an account of the house, as Fanny Burney did of Kew Palace; it was, she says, “an old moderate-sized dwelling, at that time miserably out of repair, and almost falling to ruins.” This was in 1813; in the following year the Princess, worn out by petty restraints, the coercive measures of the Prince Regent, and above all her enforced separation from her mother, escaped from the house and drove in a hackney cab to Queen Caroline’s then residence in Connaught Place. Hither, however, she returned at the urgent solicitations of Brougham and the Duke of Sussex; and here, subsequently, occurred that scene between the Regent and the Princess and her attendants which forms the subject of a well-known caricature drawing.

It is difficult to pass by Charing Cross and its manifold memories, but if we gave way to the temptation, we should find fresh attractions in Whitehall and the Strand, and I must unwillingly refrain from penetrating further east. The Haymarket, which we are now going up, and Piccadilly east, which we shall presently come to, are, however, both so full of interest that I hope we shall find matter in these “pastures new” to compensate us.