tory here, erected in 1836, under the management habitants of the park. In Hanover Lodge lived successively of the late Rev. W. R. Dawes and Mr. for some time old Lord Dundonald. At 26, Sussex J. R. Hind, gained great distinction by the dis- Place, lived for several years Mr. William Crockcovery of asteroids and variable stars. Mr. Hind ford, the proprietor of the club in St. James's Street was previously an assistant in the Royal Observa- which bore his name; and No. 11, Cornwall Terrace tory at Greenwich, and almost immediately after was long the residence of Mr. James Silk Buckingundertaking the management of Mr. Bishop's ob- ham, some time M.P. for Sheffield, and the most servatory, in 1844, he applied himself diligently to restless and indefatigable of literary toilers. Not the discovery of the small planets revolving in many months previous to his death, Mr. Buckingorbits between Mars and Jupiter. The first four of ham commenced an "Autobiography," which prothis series of asteroids, which now amount to more mised to be exceedingly voluminous. The portion than 160, were discovered in the first seven years published sufficed to show that the career of the of the present century; no further discoveries were author had been singularly chequered and advenmade till 1845, when the detection of the fifth by turous. In his early days, he went to sea in a M. Hencke induced Mr. Hind to prosecute his humble capacity. He afterwards became conresearches in this particular field of astronomy. nected with journalism in India, travelled over the Between the years 1847 and 1854 Mr. Hind's greater part of the world, and, returning to England, labours were rewarded by the discovery of no less acquired some fame as a lecturer, and grew conthan ten. In order to accomplish this work, it was spicuous by his connection with various philannecessary to construct charts of that portion of the thropic schemes, many of which, however, were heavens where the planets are usually found, and looked upon as impracticable. In 1832 he was the accuracy required in mapping down the posi- elected M.P. for Sheffield, and he continued to tions of minute stars in this region led to the dis- represent that constituency until the dissolution covery of these small planets. This observatory in 1837. His connection with the British and was a few years ago removed to Twickenham. Foreign Institute, and the ridicule with which many of his proceedings were visited by Punch, were for a long time matters of public notoriety.

Proceeding onwards, in the direction of North Gate, by St. Dunstan's Villa, we cross a bridge under which passes the Regent's Canal; on each side is a foot-path, with a beautiful margin of trees. Outside the North Gate is the extensive district of St. John's Wood, of which we have already treated, and likewise Primrose Hill, of which we shall speak presently.

This portion of the park was the scene of a deplorable accident, on the 2nd of October, 1874, by which three lives were lost. In the early mornIn the early morning, shortly before five o'clock, five barges laden with merchandise, and among the rest a large quantity of combustibles, were being towed by a steam-tug along the canal. The head of the little flotilla had just passed under the North Bridge when a terrific explosion occurred, which shook nearly the whole of London, and blew the stout iron bridge into atoms, shattering the lodge-house to pieces, and causing considerable damage to the surrounding property. The bridge has since been rebuilt on almost precisely the same plan.

Holford House, a mansion of large extent and rare magnificence a little to the north of St. Dunstan's Villa, has since the decease of its wealthy proprietor been transformed into a training college for ministers of the Baptist denomination. The college was founded at Stepney in 1810, but transplanted hither in 1856.

Another resident in Regent's Park in its early days was Ugo Foscolo, the Italian exile and poet, who built for himself a house, which he furnished sumptuously and with exquisite taste; but he had not occupied it long when it was seized by his creditors. His poetic genius rendered him utterly unpunctual and impracticable. He used to say to his friends, "Rich or poor, I will live and die like a gentleman, on like a gentleman, on a clean bed, surrounded by Venus and Apollo, and the Graces, and the busts of great men, among flowers and with music breathing around me; . . . and since I must be buried in England, I am happy in having got for the remainder of my life a cottage, independent of neighbours, open to the air of heaven, and surrounded by shrubs and flowers, among which I will build a small dwelling for my corpse, under a beautiful plane-tree from the East, which I mean to cultivate till the last day of my existence." Poor poet!"man proposes, but God disposes." Within a few months his cottage and all its belongings came to the hammer, and his memory has passed away from the Regent's Park. He died at Turnham Green in 1827, and was buried at Chiswick.

At the south-eastern corner of the park, opposite to the northern end of Portland Place, is Park Square. Its site was, in 1817, when Hughson wrote We must now mention some of the chief in- his "Walks through London," an open field, with a

Regent's Park.]

THE DIORAMA.

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variety of natural phenomena, the spectators being kept in comparative darkness, while the picture received a concentrated light from a ground-glass roof. The interior of Canterbury Cathedral, the first picture exhibited, is said to have been a triumph of architectural painting; the companion picture, the Valley of Sarnen, was equally admirable in its atmospheric effects. On one day (Easter-Monday, 1824) the receipts exceeded £200. Although the speculation was artistically successful, it did not answer commercially. In 1848, the building and ground in the rear, with the machinery and pictures, were sold; and the property, with sixteen pictures, rolled on large cylinders, subsequently realised only £3,000, not a third of the original cost of the Diorama, which was built and opened in the space of four months. The building was purchased by Sir S. Morton Peto in 1852, and turned by him into a Baptist chapel, its first minister being the Rev. Dr. Landels.

rustic gate; and the southern side of the road, where Park Crescent now stands, was much in the same condition. The houses, built in almost open country, were finished so slowly and found so few ready to take them, that for a long time it seemed doubtful whether the formation of the Regent's Park would not have to be abandoned. "The works have been so long," writes Hughson, "in this half-built state that grass has grown on the top of the walls, reaching in some places higher than the kitchen windows!" Park Square, as we have already stated,* occupies the site of what was originally intended as part of a large circus, which was to have closed the northern end of Portland Place; only one half, however, was erected, and that, as we have observed, is now called Park Crescent. The square consists of two rows of houses, elongated upon the extremities of the crescent, and separated from the Marylebone Road, from the park, and from each other by a spacious quadrangular area, laid out with ornamental pleasure grounds. Extending from the crescent to the enclosed area of the square, under the roadway, is the underground passage or tunnel, called the "Nursery-mechanical wonders, well known not only to Lonmaids' Walk," of which we have spoken in a former chapter. In 1826, Park Square was completed, and just beginning to be occupied. At No. 7 lived for many years the amiable and eccentric alderman, Sir Peter Laurie. He was the son of a small agriculturist, and came from Scotland to London to push his fortunes as a poor boy. He at first filled a clerk's place in a saddler's counting-house, and having married the daughter of his employer, set up on his own account as a merchant. He became ultimately head of the firm of Laurie and Marner, the great coach-builders of Oxford Street, and Lord Mayor of London. He died in 1861.‡

About two hundred yards to the north, and overlooking the park, stood, till 1875, the Colosseum, which was at one time a magazine of artistic and

doners, but to sight-seeing strangers from far and near who visited the metropolis; indeed, for many years it enjoyed a celebrity of its own as a place of amusement, with attractions for "country cousins," such as panoramas of London, Rome, Paris, and other cities, dioramas, dissolving views, grottoes, conservatories, a Gothic aviary, Temple of Theseus, &c. It was, perhaps, badly named, for, though "colossal" in its size, it bore no resemblance, physically or æsthetically, to that magnificent ruin, the Coliseum at Rome, and consequently could not fail to raise expectations which it disappointed afterwards. This, and the absence of an underground railway to make it easily accessible, ruined its popularity. The Colosseum itself was originally planned by Mr. Horner, a land surveyor, and was

On the east side of Park Square stands the building formerly known as the Diorama. It was built by Messrs. Morgan and Pugin, architects, and was opened in 1823. It was erected for the pur-begun in 1824 from the designs of Decimus Burton, pose of exhibiting two dioramic views which had been previously shown in Paris by the originators, MM. Bouton and Daguerre; the latter, the inventor of the Daguerreotype, died in 1851. The pictures were changed two or three times every year; they were suspended in separate rooms, and a circular room, containing the spectators, was turned round, "much like an eye in its socket," to admit the view of each alternately. The pictures were eighty feet in length and forty feet in height, painted in solid and in transparency, and arranged so as to exhibit changes of light and shade and a

Messrs. Grissell and Peto being the contractors. Together with the conservatories and garden adjoining, it occupied about an acre. It was a heavy nondescript building, polygonal in form, and surmounted by an immense dome or cupola of glass, by which alone it was lighted. In the principal or western front, towards the Regent's Park, was a grand portico, with large fluted columns, of the Doric order, supporting a bold pediment. "The whole," writes Mr. Baker in his "Pictorial Handbook of London," "resembles rather a miniature of the Pantheon at Rome, except that the portico is Doric, with only six columns, said to be full-sized models of those of the Pantheon at Athens. The

the sketches were completed upon 2,000 sheets of gave way to a panorama of the Lake of Thun, in large paper, and the building finished, no person Switzerland; but in the following year-that of could be found to paint the picture in a sufficiently the first Great Exhibition-the old panorama reshort period, and many artists were consequently asserted its claim on the public attention, and was employed upon it. At last, by the use of plat- reproduced with great success. forms slung by ropes, with baskets for conveying the colours, temporary bridges, and other ingenious contrivances, the painting was executed, but in the particular style, taste, and notions of each artist; to reconcile which, and to bring them to form one vast whole, was a novel, intricate, and delicate task which several persons tried, but without effect. At length, Mr. E. T. Parris, possessing an accurate knowledge of mechanics and perspective and practical execution in painting, combined with great enthusiasm and perseverance, accomplished the labour, principally with his own hands, standing in a wooden box or cradle suspended from cross poles, and lifted, as required, by ropes. The panorama, thus completed, was viewed from a gallery with a projecting framework beneath it, in exact imitation of the outer dome of St. Paul's, so as to produce the illusion that the spectator was actually standing at that altitude, the perspective and light and shade of the campanile towers above the western front being admirably managed. There was above this another staircase, leading to an upper gallery, the view from which was intended to represent the view from the cross at the top of St. Paul's." It has been said, with some truth, that of all the panoramic pictures that ever were painted in the world, of the proudest cities formed and inhabited by the human race, the view of London contained in the Colosseum was the most pre-eminent, exhibiting as it did, at one view, "to the eye and to the mind the dwellings of near a million and a half of human beings, a countless succession of churches, bridges, halls, theatres, and mansions; a forest of floating masts, and the manifold pursuits, occupations, and powers of its ever-active, ever-changing inhabitants."

These gigantic pictures, however, were by no means the only, though they were the principal, features of the Colosseum in the days of its celebrity. It contained a sculpture gallery, called the "Glyptothec," two large conservatories of glass, and a Swiss chalet, with mountain scenery and real water running through it, the execution of Mr. Horner, the original designer of the building. In 1834, there was exhibited here a very fine collection of animals and other curiosities from Southern and Central Africa, which created a great sensation by their novelty, and formed one of the attractions of the season. It has often been said that there is nothing new under the sun; but it may sound novel and strange to many readers to learn, on the authority of the "Chronicles of the Seasons," published in 1844, that the experiment of a skating-hall, with boards for ice, and with skates on wheels, was tried here forty years before either "rinks" or Plimpton's patent skates were heard of. The author of that book writes: "As the exercise of skating can be enjoyed in this country only for a short period in the winter, and sometimes not for many years together near our large towns, an attempt has been made to supply a substitute by which persons might glide rapidly over any level surface, though not with so much facility as upon ice. This contrivance, which . . . . emanated from a Mr. Tyers, consists of the woodwork of a common skate, or something nearly like it; but instead of a steel support at the bottom, having a single row of little wheels placed behind one another, the body of the skater being carried forward by the rolling of the wheels, instead of by the sliding of the iron. We have seen these skates used with much facility on a boarded floor. . . . . A more successful plan This panorama, though opened early in 1829, still has been adopted by an ingenious inventor, retained its popularity so long that in 1845 it was who has furnished the lovers of skating in the re-painted by Mr. Parris, when a second exhibition metropolis with a fine sheet of artificial ice. It was -the same, of course, mutatis mutandis-"London at first exhibited at the Colosseum, in the Regent's by Night," was exhibited in front of the other. It Park, but was afterwards removed to a building was illuminated in such a way as to produce the where a more spacious area could be opened for illusion of a moonlight night, with the lamps in the the purpose. The place is decorated with scenery shops, on the bridges, &c., and the rays of the representing snowy mountains, and in summer it moon falling on the rippling river. In 1848, the presents, with its parties of skaters, a strange conPanorama of Paris, painted by Danson, of the trast to the actual state of things out of doors." same size as the night view of London, was ex- The "glaciarium," or "skating-rink" of real ice, hibited there, the localities made famous by the was the invention of the late Mr. Bradwell, the chief then recent Revolution being brought out into machinist of Covent Garden Theatre, who was prominence. In 1850 both of these exhibitions himself the inventor of the ice, and first tried it