divisions, and the manner in which the "pools" are described, show that they must have formed a chain extending in a waving line from " Bayard's watering" to "the Spittle mead" at Knightsbridge-the exact course of the Serpentine River, and the stream sent off from its lower extremity. No pools are allotted to the Banqueting-house division, the reason of which seems to have been that it contained "a parcel of enclosed ground lying on the north-east corner of this division, formerly used as a meadow, commonly called Tyburn Meadow," the north-east corner being the angle formed by the great road to Acton and the road now called Park Lane. From this corner a depression of the ground can still be traced extending to the Serpentine between the heights on which the farm-house and the powder-magazine stand. These facts lead us to infer that Hyde Park was then intersected by a chain of "pools," (which old muniments of the manor of Paddington and the manor of Knightsbridge show must have been expansions in the bed of a stream,) tracing the same line as the Serpentine of the present day, and a shallow water-course running down to it from an enclosed meadow where Cumberland Gate now stands. The indentures of sale moreover enable us to make a pretty near guess as to the appearance of the ground intersected by these water-courses. The wood on the north-west or Gravel-pit division was valued at 24281. 2s. 6d. ; that on the south-west or Kensington division only at 2617. 7s. 67.; and yet the Gravel-pit division contained not much more than 112 acres, while the Kensington division contained about 177 acres. Again, the Middle division, which lay on the north side of the park between the Gravel-pit division on the west and the Banqueting-house division on the east, contained only 83 acres, 2 roods, 38 poles, and the Banqueting-house and Old Lodge divisions contained between them 217 acres, 3 roods, 16 poles; yet the wood on the Middle division was valued at 12257. 18s. 4d., while that on the other two was not valued at more than 11847. 11s. 2d. From these facts we infer that the north-western parts of the park and the banks of the "pools" were thickly wooded; that its north-east corner had fewer trees; and that the part which lay towards Kensington Gore and the town of Kensington was almost entirely denuded of wood. To complete the picture we must bear in mind that in the south-west part of the Kensington division there was "a parcel of meadowground enclosed for the deer;" that in the Banqueting-house division there was the enclosed Tyburn meadow on its north-east corner, and "that building intended at the first erection thereof for a banqueting-house, situate near the south-west corner of this division," from its position the house afterwards called Cake House or Mince-pie House, where the farm now stands; that where Apsley House is now was "the Old Lodge with the barn and stable belonging," and immediately east of it the remains of the temporary fortification thrown up in 1642. The park was enclosed-it is described in the indentures as "that impaled ground called Hide Park"-but with the exception of Tyburn meadow, the enclosure for the deer, the Old Lodge, and the Banqueting-house, it seems to have been left entirely in a state of nature. Grammont alludes to the park as presenting the ungainly appearance of a bare field in the time of Charles II. The value put upon the materials of the Old Lodge and Banqueting-house does not excite any very inordinate ideas of their splendour; it is probable, however, that the Ring, which we find a fashionable place of resort early in the reign of Charles II.,

without any mention being made of its origin, was originally the ornamental ground attached to the latter.

In this state Hyde Park seems to have continued with little alteration till the year 1730, and even then the improvements were almost exclusively confined to the part enclosed under the name of Kensington Gardens, to the history of which we must now turn our attention.

It has already been stated that the gardens attached to Kensington Palace when purchased by King William did not exceed twenty-six acres. Evelyn alludes to them on the 25th of February, 1690-1, in these words:" I went to Kensington, which King William had bought of Lord Nottingham, and altered, but was yet a patched building; but with the gardens, however, it is a very neat villa, having to it the park and a strait new way through this park." In a view of the gardens near London in December, 1691, communicated to the Society of Antiquaries by Dr. Hamilton from a MS. in his possession, and printed in the twelfth volume of the Archæologia,' the gardens are thus described :-"Kensington Gardens are not great, nor abounding with fine plants. The orange, lemon, myrtle, and what other trees they had there in summer, were all removed to Mr. Loudon's or Mr. Wise's green-house at Brompton Park, a little mile from them. But the walks and grass were very fine, and they were digging up a plot of four or five acres to enlarge their garden."

Bowack, who wrote in 1705, has given an account of the improvements then carrying on by order of Queen Anne:-" But whatever is deficient in the house, is and will be made up in the gardens, which want not any advantages of nature to render them entertaining, and are beautified with all the elegancies of art (statues and fountains excepted) There is a noble collection of foreign plants, and fine neat greens, which makes it pleasant all the year, and the contrivance, variety, and disposition of the whole is extremely pleasing; and so frugal have they been of the room they had, that there is not an inch but what is well improved, the whole with the house not being above twenty-six acres. Her Majesty has been pleased lately to plant near thirty acres more towards the north, sepa rated from the rest only by a stately green-house, not yet finished; upon this spot is near one hundred men daily at work, and so great is the progress they have made, that in less than nine months the whole is levelled, laid out and planted, and when finished will be very fine. Her Majesty's gardener has the management of this work." It appears from this passage that previous to 1705, Kensington Gardens did not extend farther to the north than the Conservatory, originally designed for a banqueting-house, and frequently used as such by Queen Anne. The eastern boundary of the gardens would seem to have been at this time nearly in the line of the broad walk which crosses them before the east front of the palace. Palace Green seems at that time to have been considered a part of the private pleasure-grounds attached to the palace, for the low circular stone building now used as an engine-house for supplying the palace with water was erected by order of Queen Anne, facing an avenue of elms, for a summer recess. The town of Kensington for some years later did not extend so far to the east as it now does. The kitchen gardens which extend north of the palace towards the Gravel-pits, and the thirty acres north of the Conservatory, added by Anne to the pleasure gardens, may have been the fifty-five acres "detached and severed from the park, lying in the north-west corner thereof," granted in the 16th

of Charles II. to Hamilton, ranger of the park, and Birch, auditor of excise, to be walled and planted with " pippins and red-streaks," on condition of their furnishing apples or cider for the King's use. The alcove at the end of the avenue leading from the south front of the palace to the wall on the Kensington road was also built by Anne's orders. So that Kensington Palace in her reign seems to have stood in the midst of fruit and pleasure gardens, with pleasant alcoves on the west and south, and a stately banqueting-house on the east-the whole confined between the Kensington and Uxbridge roads, the west side of Palace Green, and the line of the broad walk before the east front of the palace. Tickell has perpetrated a dreary mythological poem on Kensington Gardens, which we have ransacked in vain for some descriptive touches of their appearance in Queen Anne's time, and have therefore been obliged to have recourse to Addison's prose in the 477th Number of the Spectator:-" I think there are as many kinds of gardening as poetry: your makers of pastures and flower gardens are epigrammatists and sonnetteers in this art; contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages and cascades, are romance writers. Wise and Loudon are our heroic poets; and if as a 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 was at first 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 so conveniently under the eye of the beholder, on the other side of it there appears a seeming mount, made up of trees one higher than another as they approach the centre. A spectator who has not heard of this account of it, would think this circular mount was not only a real one, but that it had been actually scooped out of that hollow space, which I have before mentioned. I never yet met with any one who had walked in this garden who was not struck with that part of it which I have mentioned."

In reference to the operations of Queen Caroline, Daines Barrington remarks, in his Essay on the Progress of Gardening :'—"It is believed that George I. rather improved the gardens at Herrnhausen than those of any of his English palaces. In the succeeding reign, Queen Caroline threw a string of ponds in Hyde Park into one, so as to form what is called the Serpentine River, from its being not exactly straight, as all ponds and canals were before. She is likewise well known to have planted and laid out the gardens of Richmond and Kensington upon a larger scale, and in better taste, than we have any instances before that period. She seems also to have been the first introducer of expensive buildings in gardens, if one at Lord Barrington's is excepted." And yet Queen Anne's Green-house or Conservatory in the very gardens he was writing about must have cost something. Nearly 300 acres were added by Queen Caroline to Kensington Gardens. Opposite the Ring in Hyde Park a mound was thrown across the valley to dam up the streams connecting the chain of "pools" already mentioned. All the waters and conduits in the park, granted in 1663 to Thomas Haines on a lease of ninety-nine years, were re-purchased by the Crown. Along the line of the ponds a canal was begun to be dug. The excavation was four

hundred yards in length and forty feet deep, and cost 60007. At the south-east end of the gardens a mount was raised of the soil dug out of the canal. On the north and south the grounds, of which these works formed the characteristic features, were bounded by high parallel walls. On the north-east a fosse and low wall, reaching from the Uxbridge road to the Serpentine, at once shut in the gardens, and conducted the eye along their central vista, over the Serpentine to its extremity, and across the park. To the east of Queen Anne's gardens, immediately below the principal windows of the east front of the palace, a reservoir was formed into a circular pond, and thence long vistas were carried through the woods that circled it round, to the head of the Serpentine; to the fosse and low wall, affording a view of the park (this sort of fence was an invention of Bridgeman, "an attempt then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha-has, to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk"), and to the mount constructed out of the soil dug from the canal. This mount was planted with evergreens, and on the summit was erected a small temple, made to turn at pleasure, to afford shelter from the wind. The three principal vistas were crossed at right angles, by others at regular intervals-an arrangement which has been complained of as disagreeably formal, with great injustice, for the formality is only in the ground plot, not in any view of the garden that can meet the eye of the spectator at one time. Queen Anne's gardens underwent no further alteration than was necessary to make them harmonise with the extended grounds, of which they had now become a part.

Since the death of George II. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens have undergone no changes of consequence. The Ring, in the former, has been

deserted for the drive, and presents now an appearance which any Jonathan Oldbuck might pardonably mistake for the vestiges of a Roman encampment. New plantations have been laid out to compensate for the gradual decay of the old wood. That part of the south wall of Kensington Gardens which served to intercept between it and the Kensington road a narrow strip of the park where the cavalry barracks have been erected, has been thrown down. Queen Caroline's

artificial mound had previously been levelled. A new bridge has been thrown across the Serpentine, and more ornamental buildings been erected on its bank to serve for a powder-magazine and the house of the Humane Society, (beautiful antithesis!) and infantry barracks have been erected within the precincts of the park near Knightsbridge.

Kensington Gardens now occupy the Gravel-pit division and the larger portions of the Kensington and Middle divisions of the time of Oliver Cromwell. Farther along the Serpentine, and below the waterless waterfall, at its termination, the appearance of the park has been wonderfully changed since the time of the Protectorate. The remainder is characterised, perhaps, by a more careful surface-dressing, but in other respects it has, if anything, retrograded in internal ornament. Of the Ring, once the seat of gaiety and splendour, we may say with Wordsworth, that

it seems

"Dying insensibly away

From human thoughts and purposes,"

"To yield to some transforming power,
And blend with the surrounding trees."

We sometimes feel tempted to regret its decay, and also the throwing down of part of the south wall of the gardens, which seems to have let in too much sunlight upon them (to say nothing of east winds), and spoiled their umbrageous character. On the whole, however, the recent changes in Hyde Park are more striking in regard to its immediate vicinity, to the setting of the jewel as it were, than to the ground itself. Any one who enters the park from Grosvenor Gate (opened in 1724) and advances to the site of the Ring, will at once feel this change in its full force. Hemmed in though the park now is on all sides by long rows of buildings, one feels there, on a breezy upland with a wide space of empty atmosphere on every side, what must have been the charm of this place when the eye, looking from it, fell in every direction on rural scenes. For Hyde Park until very recently was entirely in the country. And this remark naturally conducts us to those adventures and incidents associated with Hyde Park which contribute even more than its rural position to render it less exclusively of the court, courtly, than St. James's.

Hyde Park was a favourite place of resort for those who brought in the 1st of May with the reverence once paid to it. Pepys breathes a sigh in his 'Diary' on the evening of the 30th April, 1661, (he was then on a pleasure jaunt,) to this effect :-"I am sorry I am not at London to be at Hide Park to-morrow morning, among the great gallants and ladies, which will be very fine." fine." It was very fine, for Evelyn has entered in his 'Diary,' under the date of the identical 1st of May referred to by Pepys :-" I went to Hide Park to take the air, where was his Majesty and an innumerable appearance of gallants and rich coaches, being now at time of universal festivity and joy." But even during the sway of the Puritans, the Londoners assembled here "to do observance to May," as we learn from 'Several Proceedings of State Affairs, 27th April to 4th May, 1654."Monday, 1st May. This day was more observed by people going a maying than for divers years past, and indeed much sin committed by wicked meetings with fiddlers, drunkenness, ribaldry, and the like; great resort came to Hyde Park, many hundreds of coaches and gallants in attire, but most shameful pow