Piccadilly in Three Centuries. By A. I. Dasent. (Macmillan. 188.
net.)—The hiStorion of St. James's Square has written a pleasant and discursive book about Piccadilly, with Berkeley Square and the Haymarket, tracing the successive owners of many of the houses and relating anecdotes about them. Mr. Dasent does not always tell us who built the houses. It is disappointing, for instance, to find no mention of the architect of the exquisite little house occupied by the Savile Club ; " its earlier history," we are merely told, " is uneventful," until Blucher rented it in 1814 and sat outside thefrontdoor, " acknow- ledging the salutations of the passers-by." Still we must be grateful to him for much curious information, although we could have spared the long chapter about " Old Q.," a most unedifying person. Mr. Dasent has found that Robert Baker, tho first man to build in what is now Piccadilly, was a tailor from the Strand. This new fact strengthens the theory that Baker's house, "near the windmill," was nicknamed " Pickadilly Hall " from the " nieesdilly " or " pickadill "—the large laced collar, or the stiff band supporting it, which was fashionable in the early seventeenth century, and which was doubtless sold at Baker's shop. The word was borrowed from the Spanish. Mr. Dasent might have spared himself the conjecture that the Dutch " pickedillekens " meant " the extremity or utmost part of anything " if he had consulted Murray, who states that it meant the flaps on a dress. Clarendon was the real maker of Piccadilly. The great Clarendon House, which he had barely finished before he went into exile in 1667, was the first of the Piccadilly mansions. Moreover, Clarendon sold to Lord Berkeley the site of the present Devonshire House, to
Sir William Pulteney the site of Bath House, and to Sir John Denham, poet and architect, the site of Burlington House and the Albany. Clarendon House was pulled down, within twenty years of its erection, by Sir Thomas Bond, who laid out Bond Street. But Clarendon had made Piccadilly a fashionable place of residence. Mr. Dasent has illustrated his book with some highly interesting old prints.
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