road will be opened between Campden Hill and the Palace. It would be a great convenience to the natives, and to pedestrians of all kinds, the topographer included; but as there is no such thing at present, we must content ourselves with returning into the High Street, and so keeping the north side of the way till it brings us to the Palace gates. When we entered Kensington, we kept the south side. We thus return to the point at which our survey of the town commenced; and we enter on the climax of our task.

It is not improbable that Kensington Palace and Gardens originated in the royal nursery to which allusion has been made as having been established in this district, for the benefit of his children, by King Henry the Eighth. If so, here Queen Elizabeth grew up awhile, as well as Queen Victoria;

and here health was in vain attempted to be given to the sicklier temperaments of Edward the Sixth, who died young, and his sister, Queen Mary, who lived only to be an unhappy bigot.

As the circumstance, however, does not appear ascertainable, antiquaries must put up with the later and less illustrious origin which has been found for these distinguished premises, in the house and grounds belonging to the family of the Finches, Earls of Nottingham. Whether the tenement which they occupied had once been royal or not, it seems to have been but a small mansion in their time; probably consisting of nothing more than the now least-visible portion of it north-west; and indeed, though it was subsequently enlarged under almost every one of the sovereigns by whom it was occupied, it was never, in one respect, anything but what

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it still is, namely, one of the plainest and least-pretending of princely abodes.

In vain we are told, that Wren is supposed to have built the south front, and Kent (a man famous in his time) the east front. We can no more get up any enthusiasm about it as a building, than if it were a box, or a piece of cheese. But it possesses a Dutch solidity; it can be imagined full of English comfort; it is quiet; in a good air; and though it is a palace, no tragical history is connected with it; all which considerations give it a sort of homely, fireside character, which seems to represent the domestic side of royalty itself, and thus renders an interesting service to what is not always so well recommended by cost and splendour. Windsor Castle is a place to receive monarchs in; Buckingham Palace to see fashion in; Kensington Palace seems a place to drink tea in;

and this is by no means a state of things, in which the idea of royalty comes least home

The

to the good wishes of its subjects. reigns that flourished here, appositely enough to this notion of the building, were all teadrinking reigns—at least, on the part of the ladies; and if the present queen does not reign there, she was born and bred there, growing up quietly under the care of a domestic mother; during which time, the pedestrian, as he now goes quietly along the gardens, fancies no harsher sound to have been heard from the Palace windows, than the "tuning of the tea-things," or the sound of a piano-forte.

We may thus, in imagination, see the house and the gardens growing larger with each successive proprietor. First, there is Heneage Finch, the Speaker of the House of Commons, at the accession of Charles the

First; for he is the earliest occupant we can discover. Speakers of the House of Commons, naturally enough, rush to the nearest fresh air they can find, after the heat and toil they have undergone in that illustrious human stew-pan. They did this the faster, when the stew-pan was ridiculously small; which it was, even up to the latest period of the house which the Commons occupied not many years ago; and this, in all probability, was the reason which carried Heneage Finch to his sleeping quarters in the Kensington Gravel Pits. This gentleman possessed but fifteen acres of ground; which his son, Sir Heneage Finch, afterwards Earl of Nottingham, increased by a grant that was made him out of Hyde Park. To the Earl's son and heir, Daniel, succeeded King William the Third, who bought the house and grounds of Daniel, and enlarged them