'
What Chesterfield called the 'cannonical pillars' of the house were
columns brought from Cannons, near Edgeware, the seat of the Duke of
Chandos. The antechamber of Chesterfield House has been erroneously
stated as the room in which Johnson waited the great lord's pleasure.
That state of endurance was probably passed by 'Old Samuel' in
Bloomsbury.
In this stately abode--one of the few, the very few, that seem to hold
_noblesse_ apart in our levelling metropolis--Chesterfield held his
assemblies of all that London, or indeed England, Paris, the Hague, or
Vienna, could furnish of what was polite and charming. Those were days
when the stream of society did not, as now, flow freely, mingling with
the grace of aristocracy the acquirements of hard-working professors;
there was then a strong line of demarcation; it had not been broken down
in the same way as now, when people of rank and wealth live in rows,
instead of inhabiting hotels set apart. Paris has sustained a similar
revolution, since her gardens were built over, and their green shades,
delicious, in the centre of that hot city, are seen no more. In the very
Faubourg St. Germain, the grand old hotels are rapidly disappearing, and
with them something of the exclusiveness of the higher orders.
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