222 LONDON PARKS & GARDENS 
space approached by shady lanes from Cavendish Square 
for some fifty years after that was built. The houses in 
Manchester Square were not begun till 1776—some ten 
years after the commencement of Portman Square. This 
district was all very semi-rural and unfinished until much 
later. Southey, in a letter, writes of Portman Square as 
“ on the outskirts of the town,” and approached “on 
one side by a road, unlit, unpaved, and inaccessible by 
carriages.” The large corner house, now occupied by 
Lord Portman, was built for Mrs. Montagu, “ Queen 
of the Blue Stockings,” and during her time “ Montagu 
House ” was the salon to which the literary celebrities 
of the day flocked. When Mrs. Montagu moved 
there from Hill Street she wrote to a friend, “ My 
health has not been interrupted by the bad weather 
we have had ; I believe Portman Square is the Mont¬ 
pellier of England.” In the centre of the Square garden 
was planted a “ wilderness,” after the fashion of the day, 
and early in the nineteenth century, when the Turkish 
Ambassador resided in the Square, he erected a kiosk in 
this “ wilderness,” where he used to smoke and imagine 
himself in a perfumed garden of the East. It is still 
one of the best kept-up of the squares. 
Berkeley Square dates from nearly the same time as 
Grosvenor, having been begun in 1698, on the site of the 
extensive gardens of Berkeley House, which John Evelyn 
so much admired, and where flourished the holly hedges 
of which he advised the planting. The central statue 
here was one by Beaupre and Wilton of George III., 
which was removed in 1827, and the base of the statue 
made into a summer-house. In the place of the usual 
statesman, a drinking fountain, with a figure pouring 
the water—the gift of the Marquess of Lansdowne— 
