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Piccadilly Pageant. By Simon Dewes. (Rich & Cowan. I6s.) IN spite of a quite shocking collection of misprints, mostly mis- spellings of familiar proper names, and other signs of carelessness, this resurrection of the past of westward-spreading London—west- ward from the village of Charing, between Westminster and the City—is of quite unusual interest. The artifice of a series of conversations in a club smoking-room and elsewhere between an elderly colonel and a younger habitué, who turns out to be a ghost and as ageless as Tithonus, is thin enough, but it makes the memories of the London of Addison and Poodle Byng and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, of all the great houses—Burling- ton and Berkeley and Devonshire and Hertford—of the farm on Hay Hill and 'the ale-house at Hyde Park Corner, of the White Horse Cellar and Shepherd Market and Snow's Bank, far more interesting and lively than they could have been in a straightforward narrative. Mr. Dewes has soaked himself in the lore of Piccadilly and its neighbourhood. There is hardly a street off or near it— Stratton, Clarges, Jermyn, Bond, Dover, Albemarle—whose name and origin he cannot explain, with just the right amount of illus- trative anecdote. Mere controversial is his derivation of the name Piccadilly itself from pickadils, stiff ruffs made by Mr. Higgins somewhere near where the Regent Palace Hotel now stands. A good many other explanations of the name have been offered, and this perhaps is no worse than the rest. To persons with a bent for bygone London and its history this book will give immense enjoyment.
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