PICCADILLY, BOND STREET, AND ALBERT GATE.
Wonderful changes have been made at Hyde Park Corner within a few years. Many have considered that this was one of the most effective architectural bits in London. For here was the great archway with the avenue beyond, while facing it was the elegant screen or colonnade, through which was seen the Park and the procession of carriages and promenaders. A dreadful and ungainly alteration has been made. A sort of unmeaning triangular slope has been cleared, the arch has been carted away and placed at an extraordinary and unmeaning angle. The space has been cut up in roadways, with triangular or rather mutton-chop-shaped “refuges,” in one of which an equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington has been set up. The bold irregularity of the whole--barbarous almost--causes a feeling of despair, for no amount of statues or decoration will cure the original radical defect. What must be lamented most is the injury to the beautiful open colonnade, designed by Mr. Decimus Burton to stand at the side of a street, and to be faced by other buildings. Now it looks too poor and mean to flank such a vast open _place_. Yet a little knowledge and care would have secured an effective arrangement. The arch should have been left where it was, even though it stood isolated. It was a monument. The mischief is now done, and seems irreparable.
Through the screen we can see among the trees the great bronze statue erected “by the ladies of England “ in honour of the conqueror of Waterloo. Since the days of its being cast there has always been irreverent jesting at the expense of the particular “ladies of England” who had chosen to offer this nude figure as a token of their admiration. Mr. Croker, however, once, reviewing a Frenchman’s account of a visit to London, thus vindicated the fair dames:--“Let it be known,” he says, “that the ladies of England had nothing to do with the selection of this brazen image. Both are the work, as we believe, of a self-elected committee, in which we doubt whether there was a single lady; and the whole affair was got up, we have heard, by the artist and half a dozen _dilettanti_, who cared little about the ladies or Wellington, or a triumphal monument, but were enraptured at the idea of erecting in London the copy of a statue which they had admired at Rome.”