the crown, and no notice taken of its enclosure by Henry, it has been generally assumed that it was enclosed while yet the patrimony of the convent. Kensington Gardens are properly part of Hyde Park. William III., not long after his accession to the throne, purchased from Daniel, second Earl of Nottingham, his house and gardens at Kensington. The extent of the gardens was about twenty-six acres, and with this William seems to have been perfectly satisfied. Even in this small space a part of the original Hyde Park was already included. Queen Anne enclosed nearly thirty acres of the park (lying north of her conservatory) about 1705, and added them to the gardens. Caroline, Queen of George II., appropriated no less than three hundred acres of it, about 1730; and it is only since her time that the great enclosure of Kensington Gardens, and the curtailed Hyde Park, have a separate history. The resolutions adopted by the House of Commons in 1652, relative to the sale of the crown lands, contain some curious details regarding Hyde Park. The House resolved on the 21st of December, 1652, that Hyde Park should be sold for ready money; and in consequence of this resolution it was exposed for sale in parts, called the Gravel-pit division, containing 112 acres; the Kensington division, consisting of 147 acres; and three other divisions-the Middle, Banqueting-house, and Old Lodge divisions. About £17,000 were obtained for the whole. "The deer of several sorts within the said park" were valued in addition at £765 6s. 2d. The yearly rental of the park was assumed to be £894 13s. 8d. On the site of the Old Lodge which gave name to one of the above divisions now stands Apsley House. In another part, now occupied by Hamilton-place, was the fort, with four bastions, thrown up by the citizens of London in 1642. From the specifications in the indenture of sale, it is clear that the boundaries on the north, east, and south, were the same as at present; on the west it seems to have extended almost to the front of Kensington Palace. We may also infer from them 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 park was enclosed-it is described in the indenthat 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. 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 tures as 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: acres. "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.” 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 Her Majesty has been pleased lately to plant near thirty acres more towards the north, separated 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 Gravelpits, 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 Ann's orders. So 66 that Kensington Palace in her reign seems to have already mentioned. All the waters and conduits in stood in the midst of fruit and pleasure gardens, with the park, granted in 1663 to Thomas Haines on a pleasant alcoves on the west and south, and a stately lease of ninety-nine years, were re-purchased by the banqueting-house on the east-the whole confined Crown. Along the line of the ponds a canal was between the Kensington and Uxbridge roads, the west begun to be dug. The excavation was four hundred side of Palace-green, and the line of the broad walk yards in length and forty feet deep, and cost £6000. before the east front of the palace. Tickell has At the south-east end of the gardens a mount was perpetrated a dreary mythological poem on Ken- raised of the soil dug out of the canal. On the north sington Gardens, which we have ransacked in vain for and south the grounds, of which these works formed some descriptive touches of their appearance in Queen the characteristic features, were bounded by high Anne's time, and have therefore been obliged to have parallel walls. On the north-east a fosse and low recourse to Addison's prose in the 477th Number of the wall, reaching from the Uxbridge-road to the Ser-. 'Spectator:-"I think there are as many kinds of pentine, at once shut in the gardens, and conducted gardening as poetry: your makers of parterres and the eye along their central vista, over the Serpentine flower gardens are epigrammatists and sonnetteers in to its extremity, and across the park. To the east of this art; contrivers of bowers and grottos, treillages Queen Anne's gardens, immediately below the prinand cascades, are romance writers. Wise and Loudon cipal windows of the east front of the palace, a reserare our heroic poets; and if as a critic I may single voir was formed into a circular pond, and thence long out any passage of their works to commend, I shall vistas were carried through the woods that circled it take notice of that part in the upper garden at Ken- round, to the head of the Serpentine; to the fosse and sington, which was at first nothing but a gravel-pit. low wall, affording a view of the park (this sort of It must have been a fine genius for gardening that fence was an invention of Bridgeman, an attempt could have thought of forming such an unsightly then deemed so astonishing, that the common people hollow into so beautiful an area, and to have hit the called them Ha-has, to express their surprise at finding eye with so uncommon and agreeable a scene as that a sudden and unperceived check to their walk "), and which it is now wrought into. To give this particular to the mount constructed out of the soil dug from the spot of ground the greater effect, they have made a canal. This mount was planted with evergreens, and very pleasant contrast; for as on one side of the walk on the summit was erected a small temple, made to you see this hollow basin, with its several little turn at pleasure, to afford shelter from the wind. The plantations lying so conveniently under the eye of the three principal vistas were crossed at right angles, by beholder, on the other side of it there appears a others at regular intervals-an arrangement which has seeming mount, made up of trees one higher than been complained of as disagreeably formal, with great another as they approach the centre. A spectator injustice, for the formality is only in the ground plot, who has not heard of this account of it, would think not in any view of the garden that can meet the eye of this circular mount was not only a real one, but that the spectator at one time. Queen Anne's gardens it had been actually scooped out of that hollow space, underwent no further alteration than was necessary to which I have before mentioned. I never yet met with make them harmonise with the extended grounds, of any one who had walked in this garden who was not which they had now become a part. 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" Since the death of George II. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens have undergone some further changes. The Ring, in the former, has been deserted for the 3. THE BOAT-HOUSE. 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!) (Cut, No. 3.) and infantry barracks have been erected within the precincts of the park near Knightsbridge. The flower-walk has been of recent formation. The boats for hire are also a very picturesque addition. 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— "Dying insensibly away it seems 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 on the evening of the 30th April, 1661, (he was then on a pleasure jaunt,) to this effect:-"I am sorry I am not in London to be at Hide Park to-morrow morning, among the great gallants and ladies, which will be very 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 powdered hair men, and painted and spotted women. Some men played with a silver ball, and some took other recreation. But his Highness the Lord Protector went not thither nor any of the Lords of the Commonwealth, but were busy about the great affairs of the Commonwealth." We would give a trifle to know whether one John Milton, a Secretary of the Lord Protector, was equally self-denying. In 1654 the morning view from the Ring in Hyde Park must have been not unlike this description of what had met a poet's eye in his early rambles "Some time walking not unseen By hedge-row elms on hillock green, Under the bawthorn in the dale." It may be added, that the said John Milton (perhaps with a view to be near the scene of his official duties) resided for some time in a house on the south-side of St. James's Park, at no immeasurable distance from the place where the enormities of May worship were perpetrated in 1654, under the very noses of a puritan. ical government. Be this as it may, the sports affected by the habitual frequenters of Hyde Park at all times of the year had a manly character about them, harmonising with its country situation. For example, although the Lord Protector felt it inconsistent with his dignity to sanction by his presence the profane mummery of the 1st of May, he made himself amends for his self-denial a few days afterwards, as we learn from the Moderate Intelligencer :'-" In Hyde Park, this day, there was a hurling of a great ball by fifty Cornish gentlemen of one side, and fifty on the other; one party played in red caps, and the other in white. | the rougher business of life. During the time of the seen, it became private property. Evelyn (11th April, 1653) complains feelingly of the change:-"I went to take the aire in Hide Park, where every coach was made to pay a shilling, and horse sixpence, by the sordid fellow (poor Anthony Deane, of St. Martin's in the Fields, Esq.) who had purchased it of the state, as they are called." The courtly Evelyn had no words of reprobation for Mr. Hamilton, the ranger appointed at the Restoration, who continued for ten good years to let the park in farms; it not having been enclosed with a wall and restocked with deer till 1670. The fashionable part of Hyde Park was long confined within very narrow limits; the Ring being, from all time previous to the Restoration till far in the reigns of the Georges, the exclusive haunt of the beau monde. Subsequently Kensington Gardens, at the opposite extremity of the park, was appropriated by the race that lives for enjoyment; but even after that event a considerable space within the park remained allotted to "I Hyde Park has from an early period down to our own times been a favourite locality for reviews. A splendid one took place at the Restoration, and in the very height of the show the Lord Mayor received notice that "Colonel John Lambert was carried by the park a prisoner unto Whitehall." Pepys, "did stand" at another in 1664, when Charles II. was present, while "the horse and foot march by and discharge their guns, to show a Frenche Marquisse (for whom this muster was caused) the goodnesse of our firemen ; which indeed was very good, though not without a slip now and then; and one broadside close to our coach as we had going out of the parke, even to the nearenesse to be ready to burn our hairs. Yet methought all these gay men are not the soldiers that must do the king's business, it being such as these that lost the old king all he had, and were beat by the most ordinary fellows that could be." Horace Walpole's account of a somewhat similar scene, 1759, may serve as a pendant to these remarks :-" should weary you with what everybody wearies me-the militia. The crowds in Hyde Park when the King reviewed them were unimaginable. My Lord Orford, their colonel, I hear looked ferociously martial and genteel, and I believe it; his person and air have a noble wildness in them; the regimentals, too, are very becoming, scarlet, faced with black, buff waistcoat and gold buttons. How knights of the shire, who have never shot anything but woodcocks, like this warfare I don't know; but the towns through which they pass adore them, every where they are treated and regaled." The Brobdignaggian scale of the reviews of the volunteers in the days of George III. are beyond the compass of our narrow page. The encampment of the troops in Hyde Park in 1780, after Lord George Gordon's riots, and of the volunteers in 1799, must be passed over in silence; as also the warlike doings of the fleet in the Serpentine in 1814, when a Lilliputian British frigate blew a Lilliputian American frigate out of the water, in commemoration of-the founders of the feast confessed themselves at a loss to say what. But Hyde Park, unlike St. James's, has witnessed the mustering of real as well as of holiday warriors. It was the frequent rendezvous of the Commonwealth troops during the civil war. Essex and Lambert encamped their forces here, and Cromwell reviewed his terrible Ironsides. And though Butler's muse, which, as the bee finds honey in every flower, elaborates the ludicrous from all events, has sneered at the labours of the citizens of London who threw up the fort in Hyde Park, the jest at which royalists could laugh under Charles II. was no joke to the cavaliers of Charles I. The very women shared the enthusiasm, and, as the irreverend bard alluded to sings "March'd rank and file with drum and ensign, And help'd the men to dig like moles." One circumstance that tends to impress us with the idea of the solitary character of Hyde Park and its environs, when compared with St. James's Park during the reigns of the last Stuarts and the first sovereigns of the present dynasty, is its being frequently selected, in common with the then lonely fields behind Montague House, now the British Museum, as the scene of the more inveterate class of duels. In the days when men wore swords there were many off-hand duels-impromptu exertions of that species of lively humour. Horace Walpole, sen., quarrelled with a gentleman in the House of Commons, and they fought at the stairfoot. Lord Byron and Mr. Chaworth stepped out of a dining-parlour in the Star and Garter' Tavern, Pall-mall, and fought, by the light of a bed-room candle, in an adjoining apartment. More than one duel occurred in Pall-mall itself. But there were also more ceremonious duels, to which men were formally invited some time beforehand, and in which more guests than two participated. The pistol-duel in which Wilkes was severely wounded occurred in Hyde Park. Here too the fatal duel in which the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mahon (November, 1712) fell, and their seconds were wounded, took place. Swift enables us to fix with precision the locality of this last event he says in his 'Journal to Stella,' "The Duke was helped towards the Cake-house by the Ring in Hyde Park, where they fought, and died on the grass before he could reach the house." Its loneliness is also vouched for by the frequency of highway robberies in its immediate vicinity: pocket-picking is the branch of industry characteristic of town places like St. James's Park; highway robbery and foxhunting are rural occupations. The narrative of the The narrative of the principal witness in the trial of William Belchier, sentenced to death for highway robbery in 1732, shows the state in which the roads which bound Hyde Park were at that time, and also presents us with a picture of the substitutes then used instead of a good police" William Norton: The chaise to the Devizes having been robbed two or three times, as I was informed, I was desired to go in it, to see if I could take the thief, which I did on the 3rd of June, about half an hour after one in the morning. I got into the post-chaise; the postboy told me the place where he had been stopped was near the Halfway House, between Knightsbridge and Kensington. As we came near the house the prisoner came to us on foot and said, 'Driver, stop!' He held a pistol tinderbox to the chaise and said, 'Your money directly: you must not stay, this minute your money.' I said 'Don't frighten us; I have but a trifle; you shall have it.' Then I said to the gentlemen (there were three in the chaise), 'Give your money.' I took out a pistol from my coat pocket, and from my breeches-pocket a five-shilling piece and a dollar. I held the pistol concealed in one hand and the money in the other. I held the money pretty hard: he said, 'Put it in my hat.' I let him take the five-shilling piece out of my hand: as soon as he had taken it I snapped my pistol at him; it did not go off: he staggered back, and held up his hands and said, 'Oh Lord! oh Lord!' I jumped out of the chaise: he ran away, and I after him about six or seven hundred yards, and there took him. I hit him a blow on his back; he begged for mercy on his knees; I took his neck cloth off and tied his hands with it, and brought him back to the chaise: then I told the gentlemen in the chaise that was the errand I came upon, and wished them a good journey, and brought the prisoner to London. Question by the prisoner: 'Ask him how he lives.' Norton: 'I keep a shop in Wych-street, and sometimes I take a thief.'' The postboy stated on the trial that he had told Norton if they did not meet the highwayman between Knightsbridge and Kensington, they should not meet him at all-a proof of the frequency of these occurrences in that neighbourhood. Truly while such tricks were played in the park by noblemen and gentlemen in the daytime, and by footpads at night, the propinquity of the place of execu tion at Tyburn to the place of gaiety in the Ring was quite as desirable as it seems upon first thought anomalous. The Ring, we have already observed, was the first part of the park taken possession of by the gay world. Evelyn's complaint of the exaction of the "sordid fellow who had purchased it of the state, as they are called," seems to imply that it had been a resort for horsemen and people in carriages previous to 1653. He more than once notes a visit to Hyde Park, "where was his Majesty and abundance of gallantry." The sight-seeing Pepys, too, appears from his journal, as might have been anticipated, to have been a frequent visitant. frequent visitant. His Paul Pry disposition has led him to leave on record, that on the 4th of April, 1663, he went "after dinner to Hide Parke; at the parke was the King, and in another coach my Lady Castlemaine, they greeting one another at every turn." After King William took up his abode in Kensington Palace, a court-end of the town gathered around it. The praises of Kensington Gardens, as they appeared in the days of Queen Anne, by Tickell and Addison, have already been alluded to. The large gardens laid out by Queen Caroline were opened to the public on Saturdays, when the |