senting different painters, sculptors, and musicians, from Hiram and Bezaleel, Cheops and Sennacherib, to Pugin, Barry, and Cockerell! The Memorial cost £132,000. "The Albert Memorial is worth looking at, were it but to show how easy it is to fool away three millions of francs.'-John Bull and his Island. The Iron Gates of the Park near this were made at Colebrook Dale for the south transept of the Crystal Palace of 1851. Beyond the Albert Memorial, on the right, are Kensington Gardens, the pleasantest and most picturesque of the London recreationgrounds, occupying 261 acres. They are separated from the Park by a sunk fence, and it is said that the familiar name of ‘Haha,' as applied to such fences, comes from the exclamations of the citizens of London when they unexpectedly found their progress barred in this direction. The gardens were begun by William III. near Kensington Palace, and enlarged by Queen Anne, who gave thirty acres from the park of Nottingham House, and by Queen Caroline of Anspach, who made the round pond and planted the avenues, each of which had its distinctive name, as the 'Old Pond Walk, Bayswater Walk,' &c. The groves were filled with squirrels, and a large number of tortoises, presented to the Queen by the Doge of Genoa, were distributed about the grounds. Deer remained in the gardens for some time after the commencement of the present century, and we learn from a minute of the Board of Green Cloth, dated 1798, that foxes were hunted there.2 After the court went to Richmond the gardens were opened to the public on Saturdays, but the company were desired to appear in full dress, and till 1795 no one wearing a silk necktie or leathern breeches without top-boots was admitted, and private soldiers and sailors and livery servants were excluded. The part of the gardens near the Palace still bears traces of the style in which it was laid out, when, as the garden of Nottingham House, it had the name of the ‘Siege of Troy,' from its clipped yew hedges resembling fortifications. Near the high road to the south is St. Govor's Well. An obelisk in honour of Speke, the traveller, is an incongruous disfigurement. The portion of the gardens near Hyde Park has noble groves and avenues of old trees, for these are not gardens in the usual sense, but rather a fragment of woodland scenery without underwood, dependent on trees and grass alone for their beauty. In this they recall the gardens of St. Cloud and St. Germain in miniature. * This place has something of the solemn grandeur of a wood about it-something uncultivated that delights the eye. It is like a good mile of the forest of St. Germain in the heart of town.'-John Bull and his Island. 1 Neither of the Queens took anything from Hyde Park. A plan in the Crace Collection, dated 1725, twelve years before Queen Caroline died, shows the boundary between Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park to have been the same then as it is now. 2 See for a most interesting paper on Kensington Gardens, The Builder, April 6, 1878. Here Matthew Arnold could write 'In this lone, open glade I lie, Screen'd by deep boughs on either hand; Those black-crown'd, red-boled pine trees stand ?' C'est dans ce parc de Kensington que j'ai médité l'Essai historique ; que, relisant le journal de mes courses d'outre-mer, j'en ai tiré les amours d'Atala ; c'est aussi dans ce parc, apris avoir erré au loin dans les campagnes sous un ciel baissé, blondissant et comme pénétré de la clarté polaire, que je traçai au crayon les premières ébauches des passions de Rene. Je déposais, la nuit, la moisson de mes réveries du jour dans l'Essai historique et dans les Natchez.'--Chateaubriand, Memoires d'Outre Tombe.' The pleasantest walk is that nearest Hyde Park, which, especially on Sunday afternoons, is the favourite promenade, while more distant parts of the gardens are deserted : Yet tho''tis too rural, to come near the mark, The chimneys of Knightsbridge, and-footmen at cricket.' This walk ends in a bridge over the Serpentine, designed by Rennie in 1826, whence there are delightful views up and down the water, especially charming in the rhododendron season. The fashions which enliven the scene on Sundays recall the lines of Tickell Where Kensington, high o'er the neighbouring lands, And chintz, the rival of the showery bow.' The summer-house near the fountains at the head of the Serpentine is the same which was erected for Queen Mary in Kensington Gardens. Near it is a statue of Dr. Edward Jenner, to whom Eng. land is indebted for vaccination, by W. C. Marshall. Addison greatly extols the early landscape gardeners employed at Kensington : "Wise and Loudon are our heroic poets; and if, as critic, I may single out any passage of their works to commend, I shall take notice of that part in the upper garden at Kensington, which at first was nothing but a gravel-pit. It must have been a fine genius for gardening that could have thought of forming such an unsightly hollow into so beautiful an area, and to have hit the eye with so uncommon and agreeable a scene as that which it is now wrought into. To give this particular spot of ground the greater effect, they have made a very pleasing contrast; for, as on one side of the walk you see this hollow basin, with its several little plantations, lying conveniently under the eye of the beholder, on the other side of it there appears a seeming mount, made up of trees, rising one higher than another, in proportion as they approach the centre.'--Spectator, No. 477. Here in Kensington are some of the most poetical bits of tree and stump, and sunny brown and green glens and tawny earth.'—Haydon's Autobiography. Kensington Palace, as Nottingham House, was the residence of the Lord Chancellor Heneage Finch, Earl of Nottingham, the man of rueful countenance, called 'Old Dismal' by his contemporaries 'At the bar abusive, on the bench unable, Knave at the woolsack, fop at the council-table.' The son of the Lord Chancellor sold the house to William III. in 1690, when Evelyn describes it as a patched-up building-but, with the gardens, a very neat villa.' The king employed Wren to add a story to the old house, which forms the north front of the existing palace, and to build the present south front. William, who always suffered from asthma in London, and thought that he breathed more freely in the purer air, delighted in Kensington. In order that he might more easily reach Whitehall and Westminster, a high-road was made through Hyde Park and St. James's Park, and was lighted by a chain of lanthorns at night. The improvement of the palace became his passion, and while he was absent in Ireland Queen Mary's letters to her irascible spouse are full of the progress of his works there, and of abject apologies because she could not prevent chimneys smoking and rooms smelling of paint. Immediately after the king's return from Holland (Nov. 10, 1691), a great fire broke out in the palace, in which William and Mary, having narrowly escaped being burnt in their beds, fled into the garden, whence they watched their footguards as they passed buckets to extinguish the flames. When her new rooms were finished, Mary held the drawing-rooms there, at which her hostility to her sister Anne first became manifest to the world, the Princess making all the professions imaginable, to which the Queen remained as insensible as a statue.' It was in a still existing room that Mary, when (Dec. 1694) she believed herself attacked by the small-pox, sat up nearly all through a winter's night, burning every paper which could throw light upon her personal history; and here, as her illness increased, William's sluggish affections were awakened, and he never left her, so affectionately stifling his asthmatic cough not to disturb her that, on waking from a long lethargy, she asked where the king was, for she did not hear him cough.' As the end approached she received the Sacrament, the bishops who were attending taking it with her: 'God knows,' said Burnet,' a sorrowful company, for we were losing her who was our chief hope and glory on earth.' It was then that the Queen begged to speak secretly to the Archbishop Tenison ; and when he expected something important, bade him take away the Popish nurse whom, in the hallucination of illness, she imagined Dr. Radcliffe had set to watch her from behind the screen. Mary died on the morning of December 28, 1694, and William was then in such passionate grief that he swooned three times on that terrible day. After Mary's death William remained in seclusion and grief at Kensington, whither Anne came to condole with him, carried in her sedan-chair (for she was close upon her confinement) into his very room—the King's Writing-Room, which is still preserved. There in 1696 William buckled the Order of the Garter with his own hands on the person of Anne's eldest child, the little Duke of Gloucester; and hither, after he had received his death-hurt by a fall from his sorrel pony at Hampton Court, he insisted upon returning to die, March 8, 1702. After William's death, Anne and Prince George of Denmark took possession of the royal apartments at Kensington. But the mother of seventeen children was already childless, and she made her chief residence at St. James's, coming for the Easter recess to Kensington, where she planted 'Queen Anne's Mount,' and built in the gardens "Queen Anne's Banqueting Room,' in which she gave fêtes which were attended by all the great world of London in brocaded robes, hoops, fly-caps, and fans.' The love of flowers which the queen manifested here led to her being apostrophised as 'Great Flora’in the verses of Tom D'Urfey. The Palace was settled on Prince George. 6 'Or Kensington, sweet air and blest retreat Of him that owns a sovereign, though most great.' But in the same gloomy rooms in which she had seen the last hours of her sister and brother-in-law, Queen Anne (Oct. 20, 1708) lost her husband, with whom she bad lived in perfect happiness for twenty years. The Duchess of Marlborough describes her agony afterwards in the chamber of death-weeping and clapping her hands, swaying herself backward and forward, clasping her hands together, with other marks of passion.' She was led away that evening by the Duchess to her carriage, to be taken to St. James's, but stopped upon the door-step to desire Lord Godolphin to see that, when the Prince was buried at Westminster, room should be left for her in his grave. Anne did not live so much at Kensington after her husband's death, but it was here, on July 20, 1714, that Mrs. Danvers, the chief lady in waiting, found her staring vacantly at the clock in her Presence Chamber with death in her look.' It was an apoplectic seizure. On her death-bed she gave a last evidence of the love towards her people which had been manifested through her whole reign, by saying, as she placed the Lord Treasurer's wand in the hands of the Duke of Shrewsbury, ‘For God's sake use it for the good of my people. But from that moment, having accomplished her last act as queen, Anne seems to have retraced in spirit the acts of her past life, and to have been filled with all the agonies of remorse for her conduct to her father and his son—'Oh, my brother, my poor brother, what will become of you !' was her constant cry. To the Bishop of London, who was watching beside her, she intrusted a message, which he promised to deliver, but which he said would cost him his head. On hearing of her repentance the Jacobite lords hurried to Kensington. Atterbury proposed to proclaim the Chevalier at Charing Cross; the Duke of Ormonde would join him if the Queen could but recover consciousness to mention him as her successor. Lady Masham undertook to watch her, but it was too late. "She dies upwards, her feet are cold and dead already,' were her hurried words in the ante-chamber, and by eight o'clock on Sunday morning, August 1, 1714, 'good Queen Anne' was dead. The rooms on the north-west of the Palace were added by George II., and intended as a nursery for his children. Queen Caroline used to hold her courts here on Sundays after morning service. George II. died in the Palace (October 25, 1760), suddenly, in his seventy-seventh year, falling upon the floor just after he had taken bis morning chocolate, and when he was preparing to walk in the garden. George III. did not occupy Kensington Palace himself, but as his family grew up its different apartments were assigned to them. Caroline, Princess of Wales, lived there, with her mother, the Duchess of Brunswick, after her separation from her husband within a year after their marriage. In the south wing lived Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, with his first wife, Lady Augusta Murray. He held his conversaziones there as President of the Royal Society; he collected there his magnificent library; and there he died, April 21, 1843. His second wife, created Duchess of Inverness, continued |