THE estates purchased by the Commissioners for the site and grounds of the new National Gallery include those just described, which consist of about twenty acres; and it will, probably, when all the purchases are completed, approach to a hundred. It widens as it goes south, and reaches to Old Brompton.

KENSINGTON NEW TOWN.

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From this point to the town of Kensington we pass houses both old and new, some in rows, and some by themselves, enclosed in gardens. They are all more or less good; and the turnings out of them lead into a considerable district, which has lately been converted from nursery and garden-ground into more streets, and is called Kensington New Town. It is all very clean and neat, and astonishes visitors who a few years ago beheld scarcely a house on the spot. A pleasant hedge-lane, paved in the middle, and looking towards the wooded grounds of Gloucester Lodge, where Canning lived, leads out of it into Old Brompton. One street, which has no thoroughfare, is quite of a stately character, though deformed at the corner with one of those unmeaning rounded towers, whose tops look like pepper-boxes, or "Trifles from

Margate." The smaller streets also partake of those improvements, both external and internal, which have succeeded to the unambitious, barrack-like streets of a former generation; nor in acquiring solidity, have they, for the most part, been rendered heavy and dumpy; the too common fault of new buildings in the suburbs. It is ridiculous to see lumpish stone balconies constructed for the exhibition of a few flower-pots; and doors, and flights of steps, big enough for houses of three stories, put to “ 'cottages of one. Sometimes, in these dwarf suburban grandiosities, the steps look as weighty as half the building; sometimes the door alone reaches from the ground to the story above it; so that "cottages " look as if they were inhabited by giants, and the doorways as if they had been maximized, on purpose to enable them to go in.

KENSINGTON HOUSE.

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This Kensington New Town lies chiefly between the Gloucester and Victoria Roads. Returning out of the latter into the high road, we pass the remainder of the buildings above noticed, and, just before entering Kensington itself, halt at an old mansion, remarkable for its shallowness compared with its width, and attracting the attention by the fresh look of its red and pointed brick-work. It is called Kensington House, and surpasses Gore House in the varieties of its history; for it has been, first, the habitation of a king's mistress; then a school kept by an honest pedant, whom Johnson visited; then a French emigrant school, which had noblemen among its teachers, and in which the late Mr. Sheil was brought up; then a Roman Catholic boarding-house, with Mrs. Inchbald for an inmate; and now it is an 66 asylum," a term into which that

consideration for the feelings which SO honourably marks the progress of the present day, has converted the plain-spoken "madhouse of our ancestors.

The king's mistress was the once famous Duchess of Portsmouth, a Frenchwoman,Louise de Querouaille-who first came to England in the train of Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, the sister of Charles the Second. She returned; and remained, for the express purpose (it is said) of completing the impression she had made on Charles, and assisting the designs of Louis the Fourteenth and the Jesuits in making him a papist, and reducing him to the treasonable condition of a pensioner on the French Court. Traitor and pensioner, at all events, his Majesty became, and the French woman became an English Duchess; but whether she was a party to the plot, or simply its unconscious instrument,