Eaton Square

“ If one was so made one had certainly no business, on any terms, at Matcham; whereas if one wasn’t one had no business there on the particular terms—terms of conformity with the principles of Eaton Square—under which one had been so absurdly dedicated. Deep at the heart of that resurgent unrest in our young man which we have had to content ourselves with calling his irritation—deep in the bosom of this falsity of position glowed the red spark of his inextinguishable sense of a higher and braver propriety. ”

“ You do not see it again, if you are walking up Broadway, till you are close to Madison Square. Then, if you lift your eyes, you are suddenly aware of it looming far aloft over the cornice-line to your right, shredding the mists on a stormy day, or by night lifting its lantern up with the stars. There is always an added impressiveness about a tower when we cannot see the base. The sheer drop of its sides is left to our imagination, and the human imagination may generally be trusted to embroider fact. ”

“ How often in New York it is a tower which gathers the picture together! Ours is a city of towers. We hide Trinity spire in a well, and Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright, once complained that the windows of his hotel room on the Avenue looked down upon the pinnacle of a church steeple. Yet our towers rise just the same, new ones leaping up as far above the new three-hundred-foot sky-line as Trinity steeple once lifted above lower Broadway. We aspire still. Nor is the old Judson tower on Washington Square yet dwarfed. ”

“ London contains in the West End many squares surrounded by handsome residences, among them probably the best known being Belgrave, Russell, Bedford, Grosvenor, Hanover, and Cavendish Squares. Eaton Square is said to be the largest of these, Grosvenor Square the most fashionable, and Cavendish Square the most salubrious and best cultivated. The line of streets leading by Oxford Street to the Marble Arch entrance to Hyde Park is London's most fashionable route of city travel, and on Tottenham Court Road, which starts northward from Oxford Street, is the "Bell Inn" at Edmonton. ”

“ The other woman who loved and was loved by him moved about her world in these days with a face less radiant than the one people turned to look at in the street or in its passing through the house in Eaton Square. ”

“ In an instant the whole great square of the Place Royale, which had been crowded with men, horses, carts, and carriages, was completely cleared, as if by magic, and entirely deserted. The terrified people fled in every direction, as if for their lives. ”

“ This is probably one reason why our æsthetic sense is not adjusted to find more beauties than we do in the physical aspects of New York City. Deep in our consciousness, if not rather our subconsciousness, lies the ache for green vistas and gardens, for low sky lines and quiet streets. When we speak of the picturesque in New York, we most often refer (aside from the obviously striking aspect of the lower city from the harbor) to the old brick houses on Washington Square or the quaint streets of Greenwich Village. ”

“ We sauntered moodily from the spot, and bent our steps towards Eaton-square, then just building. What was our astonishment and indignation to find that bells were fast becoming the rule, and knockers the exception! ”

“ Tompkins leisurely sips her cocoa as she breaks her fast in the pretty morning room at No. —— Eaton Square, her step-daughter, an American born and bred, is her companion, a tiny young woman all pale tints, colourless face, sharp features, sharp little eyes always watery, always with a red rim about them giving the paleness of their blue a pink shade. When off guard the mouth is resolute, the eyes wearing a stealthy cunning look; the mask on, 'tis an old-child face with a wondering expression of innocence about it. ”

“ Mr. Gladstone was wont to amuse himself with speculations as to the future dimensions of London; what had been its growth within his memory; what causes might arise to cheek its increase. After listening to his remarks on the subject one day at dinner, I observed that I had heard Lord Ebury talk of shooting over ground which is now Eaton Square. Mr. Gladstone of course did not doubt it; but some of the young men smiled incredulously. I afterwards wrote to Lord Ebury to make sure that I had not erred. ”

“ There was a board “To Let” up before a certain house in Eaton Square. Both the board, and the house which it advertised, appeared particularly decayed and out of repair. There were even windows broken in the latter; and what with its dingy walls, and flaking stucco, and the vision of a wrecked venetian blind or two dropping forlorn slats across the inner obscurity, the house looked actually frowsy for such a neighbourhood. Thither one morning came Geoletti and stealthily examined the legend painted on the board. “Apply to Foot & Liddel, Poultry,” he read with difficulty ”

“ It leads to Eaton Square, built by Cubitt in 1827-53. This is 1,637 feet long by 371 feet wide, 15 acres in extent, and contains six enclosed gardens. The houses are of the usual type. At the west end is St. Peter's Church, built in 1826 in Ionic style from designs by Hakewell at a cost of £21,515. An altar-piece by Hilton, R.A., was presented by the British Institution in 1828, but was removed in 1877, and is now in the South Kensington Museum. ”

“ The handsomest shops are in them. The neighborhood has the honor of containing Eaton Hall, the seat of the Duke of Westminster. We visited it, driving and walking all over its splendid walks, and gardens, and lawns, and parks, and getting a first-rate look into the palace. We could not go inside, because it was full of workmen finishing the inside ornamentation. The grounds are ten square miles in extent. There were immense conservatories, full of the rarest flowers and plants. In one I saw the Egyptian lotus floating in full bloom in an immense tank. The head gardener was our guide. ”

“ It is the veil of spring, cast with delicate hand over the city. These laughing sight-seers atop the green 'bus now going under the arch feel it, too. These children screaming round your feet, as they dash through the wind-borne fountain spray, are aware of it. There is an answering benignity in the calm, red brick dwellings up the vista of the Avenue. Wait for a few hours, let the sun sink behind the heights of Hoboken, and then wander once more into the Square. Twilight, a warm, balmy twilight, is upon your spirit. ”

“ To begin with, the chambermaid had, in disobedience to his strict orders, taken up the centre rug and sent it up on the roof for the porter to beat. Being an expensive rug, the Man Above the Square did not particularly relish having it frequently beaten. But still less did he relish the way it had been replaced. It was not in the centre of the room, so that two legs of the library desk in the middle stood on the border and two on the diamond centre. One end was too near the piano, the other consequently too far from the hearth. ”

“ And my peppermints are all eaten, too, and the gossamer web of memory dissolves, the picture fades, and I see before me this room of mine, littered with some learned literature but more pipes and prints and miscellaneous rubbish, and I hear outside in the Square, not the spring wind racing among the budding branches, but the coughing of a consumptive motor car, the penetrating squeak of a trolley rounding a curve on a dry track, the irritating jolt of heavy drays, and a great, subdued, never-ceasing rumble and roar, the key-note of the giant city. Only the little bag remains. ”

“ Beside the parks and gardens, London has an infinity of squares, commons, and crescents, which are surrounded by private residences and inclosed by railings and walls—such as Trafalgar Square (public) , Bedford, Cavendish, St. George's, Grosvenor, Leicester, Soho, Belgrave, Euston, Finsbury, Fitzroy, Portman, Russell, Wellclose, Hanover, Brunswick, Eaton, Berkeley, Golden, Mecklenburg, Red Lion, Tavistock, and a great number of other squares which I do not now call to mind. ”

“ Even in old New York there were once such names rich in historical association as Long Acre Square, now reduced to Times Square to please the vanity or cupidity of a newspaper. But, save the Indians, no body of people on this continent, not even the old-time cowboys and prospectors with their Bright Angel Trail, have ever rivaled the southern highlanders, the mountain folk of the Blue Ridge, the Great Smokies and the Cumberlands, in the bestowal of picturesque titles. It is hard, sometimes, to say whether the southern mountaineers are poets or humorists or realists ”

“ The Man Above the Square laid aside the paper, leaned toward his fire, took up the poker (an old ebony cane adorned with a heavy silver knob which bore the name of an actor once loved and admired) and rolled the top log over slowly and meditatively. The end of the cane was scarred and burned from many a contest with stubborn logs, and the Man Above the Square looked at the marks of service with a smile before he stood the heavy stick again in its place by the fireside.
“It isn't every walking-stick which comes to such a good end,” he said aloud. ”

“ In Bergen the old orchard on the Merselis farm, near Orchard street, called the Merselis Grove, was for years a resort for picnic parties. To-day there is the Caledonia Park; the Blakely Wilson Homestead, on Baldwin avenue, belonging to a private corporation and hired out to associations for picnic and games. The only city parks are Van Vorst Square and Hamilton Park, which were originally given to the town of Van Vorst, the first by the Van Vorst family and the other by John B. Coles, the founder of the town, and the four park corners at the intersection of Washington and Grand streets. ”

“ Volume 1 closes with an interesting account of how they entertained the children of New York City at the annual circus held in Madison Square Garden, and which completes the account of the first half of the tour of the United States by Teddy-B and Teddy-G, the Roosevelt Bears.
These books can be procured from all book dealers in the United States and Canada. ”

“ Have you seen it, too, down Madison Avenue in the mysterious twilight hour of blue and gold when all New York is beautiful? The street lamps have come on; the dark figures of home-going pedestrians hurry past you; there are lamps in the windows of houses. A filmy blue veil of twilight obscures the distances, so that they are soft, alluring. The tower is pale, almost ethereal, at the end of the vista. Its great clock, pricked out with golden lamps, seems scarce a third of the way up its side. The white walls rise on, and on, with here and there a spot of gold, and taper into nothing. ”

“ Let me confess at once that we are a bit supercilious in our attitude toward the sister Square far to our West, across the Alps of Broadway. Our Square was an established center of the social respectabilities when the foot of Fifth Avenue was still frequented by the occasional cow whose wanderings are responsible for the street-plan of Greenwich Village. Our Square remains true to the ancient and simple traditions, whereas Washington Square has grown long hair, smeared its fingers with paint and its lips with free verse, and gone into debt for its inconsiderable laundry bills. ”

“ At Twenty-third street, Broadway runs diagonally across Fifth avenue, touching the southwestern corner of Madison Square—not so very long since the most genteel locality in New York, but now, like Union Square, becoming occupied by hotels and business houses.
Fifth Avenue, the most splendid avenue in America, makes a beginning at Washington Square, a lovely public park embowered in trees, which was once Potters' Field, the pauper burying ground, and where one hundred thousand bodies lie buried. New York University and Dr. Hutton's Church face the square on the east. ”

“ Yet the other tower, too, does not suffer, its femininity is the more alluring. But lift your eyes as you walk through this commonplace cross-street of New York, and you may see as picturesque a vista, over the quaint wooden cottage, as any city, anywhere, affords—forty stories looking down on two and a half, and between them, in intermediate flight, St. Gaudens' bronze Diana.
Snow in the city! We in New York think of bespattered boots, of horses falling down, of dirty piles, more black than white, lining the streets like igloos till the tip-carts come and carry them off. ”

“ Then darkness gathers, the reflected lights in the blackening water grow more golden, and suddenly, perhaps, a duck swims across a tenth story window and sets it dancing in golden ripples. You may fare far among the ancient and “picturesque” cities of the earth without finding a rival for this strange bit of beauty in New York, an ethereal sky-scraper in white and gold gazing at its own reflection in the forest pool! [140]
Twilight in the Park, indeed, converts more than one building into a thing of beauty, and the Plaza into a thing of beauty from more than one view. ”

“ But how many know that it is probably the one sky-scraper in the world which can gaze at its own reflection in still water, and that to the spectator looking at it over this water-mirror it becomes a gigantic but ethereal Japanese design, even to the pine limb flung across the upper corner?
They say there is an hour at twilight when all men appear noble, and all women beautiful. Certainly there is such a twilight hour when New York City is veiled, oftimes, in loveliness; and most lovely at this hour is the Plaza mirrored in the pool. ”

“ There is stillness and space—grassy, oak-studded space—at Eaton Hall, where the Marquis of Westminster dwells (or I believe can afford to humour his notion of not dwelling) , but there is a crowd and a hubbub in Chester. Wherever you go the population has overflowed. You stroll on the walls at eventide and you hardly find elbow-room. You haunt the cathedral shades and a dozen sauntering mortals temper your solitude. You glance up an alley or side street and discover populous windows and doorsteps. You roll along country roads and find countless humble pedestrians dotting the green waysides. ”