The romance of deer-shooting is gone-in the South, at least. You see that rude ladder leading up into the bole of an oak, where the spreading limbs form a natural seat. There, as evening tempts the herd to feed luxuriously and securely, the treacherous keeper bides his time till "the hart of grease" bounds along, and the rifle stretches him on the turf,-honoured in death, with two inches of fat upon his haunch. Now, we are in a hawthorn dell. Where are the lads and lasses" to fetch in the May?" They are gone for ever-together with the Palace, where tournaments and galliards were once rife, and which was a chosen seat of song in the days of

"Those flights upon the banks of Thames

Which so did take Eliza and our James."

There is an old view, engraved in Nicholls'' Progresses,' of Richmond Hill and the Palace, in its turretted splendour. On the opposite shore, now known as Twickenham Park, the print shows us a merry group of Morrice-dancers with the Hobby-horse. These, too, are gone with the Mayers. Well; let us endeavour to keep the spirit, if not the forms, of old English cheerfulness. A merry peal is ringing out from some distant church tower. There is the tower-that of Kingston-seen through the frame of those noble oaks. Another mile-by a charming lodge embosomed in lilacs and laburnums-will carry us down the hill, out of the Park at the Kingston gate.

Imagine Kingston passed through. It is a nice quiet town, with some pretty houses on the Thames bank, and moreover has something to say about early kings. But our present business is with the ever-during freshness of the teeming earth. We are in Hampton Wick-on the edge of BUSHY PARK. Somewhere on the banks of the Thames, in a public-house, not a hotel, have we seen the immortal representation of the man who gave us the right of entering Bushy Park by this easy stile. The Cobbler of Hampton Wick, Timothy Bennett, was a real patriot in the days when a minister's gold did its straightforward work effectually-the good old days of honest pay for willing hire. The print of Timothy Bennett, ætat. seventy-five, in the year 1752, tells us, if we remember rightly, that he, "being unwilling to leave the world worse than he found it, by a vigorous application of the laws of his country, obtained a free passage through Bushy Park, which had long been withheld from the people." Honour to the Hampton Wick cobbler-the "village Hampden," who the great "tyrant of his fields withstood." It was no joke to battle with the Crown; but the Cobbler was triumphant. Thus has everything good in our institutions been won, inch by inch. Well; the man who was unwilling to leave the world worse than he found it, had the good taste also to prefer a wide park to a dusty road under a dreary wall. How he must have rejoiced, in his victorious old age, when he rested himself under the shadow of that forest of hawthorns-the slow growth of centuries -that he had opened these enjoyments to the common people. Perhaps he was only thinking of a shorter cut to Teddington. Be it so. Taste is sure to follow in the steps of a well-directed utility.

But the Chestnut avenue of Bushy! We have come thus far to look upon it. We have passed the hawthorn thicket, and are in the avenue. But these are limes! True. Another avenue: but these are limes and elms blended! Are they not of wondrous beauty, in their loftiness and gracefulness? But the Chestnut avenue! Look then across the road, upon those dark masses of a single tree, with thousands of spiral flowers, each flower a study, powdering over the rich green from the lowest branch to the topmost twig. Look up and down this wondrous avenue. Its mile length seems a span ;-but from one gate to the other, there is a double line of unbroken green, with flowers, rich as the richest of the tropics, contending for the

mastery of colour. Saw you ever such a gorgeous sight? Fashionable London even comes to see it; but in the Whitsun-week, and during the some twenty days of the glories of the chestnut, thousands of those who have "the true city calenture" will come here to rejoice in the exceeding beauty of this marvel of nature, which the art of the Dutch gardeners, whom William of Nassau brought to teach us, have left as a proud relic of their taste. Never ought the "prolixity of shade" to be "obsolete," whilst it can produce such scenes as this great avenue of Bushy! When London is crammed to overflowing in the spring of 1851, the Chestnut avenue of Bushy Park will amply repay a ten miles trip by railway or boat-for one spring "certifieth another."

GREENWICH PARK.

The Greenwich Railway is the quickest conveyance; the steam-boat the most attractive. For a few pence the same miles of water may be passed over that once saw the pageants of kings as a common incident. Between Westminster and the Tower, and the Tower and Greenwich, the Thames was especially the royal road. When Henry VII. willed the coronation of his Queen Elizabeth, she came from Greenwich, attended by "barges freshly furnished with banners and streamers of silk." When Henry VIII. avowed his marriage with Anne Boleyn, she was brought by "all the crafts of London" from Greenwich to the Tower, "trumpets, shawms, and other divers instruments, all the way playing and making great melody." The river was not only the festival highway, but the more convenient one, for kings as well as subjects. Hall tells us, "This year (1536), in December, was the Thames of London all frozen over, wherefore the king's majesty, with his beautiful spouse Queen Jane, rode throughout the city of London to Greenwich." The interesting volume of the "Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VIII." contains item upon item of sums paid to watermen for waiting with barge and boat. The barge was evidently always in attendance upon the king; and the great boat was ever busy, moving household stuff and servants from Westminster to Greenwich or to Richmond. In 1531 we have a curious evidence of the king being deep in his polemical studies, in a record of payment "to John, the king's bargeman, for coming twice from Greenwich to York Place with a great boat with books for the king." We see the “great Eliza " on the Thames, in all her pomp, as Raleigh saw her out of his prison-window in the Tower, in 1592. In the time of Elizabeth and the First James, and onward to very recent days, the North bank of the Thames was studded with the palaces of the nobles; and each palace had its landing-place, and its private retinue of barges and wherries; and many a freight of the brave and beautiful has been borne, amidst song and merriment, from house to house, to join the masque and the dance; and many a wily statesman, muffled in his cloak, has glided along unseen in his boat to some dark conference with his ambitious neighbour. Nothing could then have been more picturesque than the Strand, with its broad gardens, and lofty trees, and embattled turrets and pinnacles. Upon the river itself, busy as it was, fleets of swans were ever sailing; and they ventured unmolested into that channel which is now narrowed by vessels from every region. Paulus Jovius, who died in 1552, describing the Thames, says, "This river abounds in swans, swimming in flocks; the sight of whom, and their noise, are vastly agreeable to the fleets that meet them in their course." Shakspere must have seen this sight, when he made York compare the struggle of his followers at the battle of Wakefield to a swan encountering a tidal stream :

"As I have seen a swan,

With bootless labour, swim against the tide,

And spend her strength with over-matching waves.”

But the sight in our days is more truly glorious. The shipping of the Thames is, perhaps, of all the great features, the one which most strikes foreign tourists in England. "What a throng of ships," says Von Raumur, "and what restless activity ! Paris, with its few scattered boats on the Seine, is nothing compared with this..... From Woolwich to Greenwich activity continues to increase, till we approach the docks, and hasten through forests of ships. What I saw of the same kind at Havre, Bordeaux, and Marseilles, can be compared but to a single chamber cut out of these enormous palaces. . . . . Here we see and acknowledge that London is the true metropolis of the world, and not Paris, with the pretensions of its journalists and coteries." The Parsees, three native gentlemen of Bombay, who visited England a few years ago, thus express themselves on the same subject :-"When we came within about five miles of London, we were surprised at the amazing number of vessels, from the humble barge to the more beautiful ships and steamers of all descriptions. The colliers were most numerous, and vessels were anchored close to each other, and the river seemed to be almost covered with vessels; and the masts and yards gave it the appearance of a forest, at a distance. Indeed, there were to be found ships from all parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America; and a great number of steamers ply about in all directions, filled with passengers. None of our countrymen can form an idea of this noble river, and the shipping on it." The Thames, covered with the vessels of all nations, may fitly prepare the mind for visiting the palace of those veterans who have sailed under the British flag during many a year of tempest and of battle. Now you will pass alongside the hulk of some immense ship, destined to be broken up, and you may think of these fine lines of Campbell, which stir the heart "as with a trumpet:"

"Britannia needs no bulwark,

No towers along the steep;
Her march is o'er the mountain waves,
Her home is on the deep."

Again, some steam-vessel from Boulogne, or Hamburgh, or the Rhine, will sweep by, heaving the wave all around in its impetuous course ;-and you may reflect how much nobler are the triumphs of peace than those of war, and that the unbounded commerce of England is a better thing for herself and the world than even her proudest victories. In the mean time, the domes and colonnades of Greenwich will rise from the shore, and impress your mind with a magnificence of which the architecture of England presents few examples ;-and you will feel an honest pride when you know that few of the great ones of the earth possess palaces to be compared with the splendour of this pile, which the gratitude of our nation has assigned as the retreat of its wounded and worn-out sailors.

It is not our purpose now to describe Greenwich Hospital. The park invites us. We pass by the domes and colonnades of the palace of veterans, and by a small wicket enter a free space of great natural beauty. With a limited extent few parks can offer a greater variety of surface, or more magnificent trees. The views from the two hills, that near the Observatory and the "One-tree" hill,-are almost unrivalled. The broad river may be traced for several miles, winding its way to the sea, with every variety of vessel, from the stately Indiaman to the trim yacht, giving life to its silent course. Every now and then clouds of smoke are sent up from the passing

There, is a

steamers, with their threepenny fares, or their freights for distant ports. gay boat rushing away with its three or four hundred holiday makers to Gravesend ; and there, an emigrant ship, with anxious hearts aboard, on its five months' voyage to Australia. The great city looms out of its canopy of smoke-dim and shadowy→→→ venerable in its associations with the past-sublime in its present aggregation of riches and poverty, of hope and fear. But the park is full of light and cheerfulness; -green lawns and leafy avenues. Science here, too, asserts her majestic control over the movements of ordinary life. The ship that passes Greenwich on her distant voyage regulates her course by the ball that falls from that Observatory at the instant of noon. In that building are the calculations made, surpassing in their accuracy, by which the navigation of distant seas is rendered safe to the practised seaman. That noble institution, founded in 1675, has been the seat of the labours of the greatest astronomers and mathematicians that England has produced-Flamstead, Halley, Bradley, Maskelyne, Pond, and Airy. Under the guidance of the last of these illustrious names, the operations of Greenwich Observatory have been carried out in a way that has won the admiration of the civilized world. Those who would know what is daily and nightly being done in this marvellous place, should read a graphic and most admirable description in Mr. Dickens' 'Household Words.'

HINTS FOR THE STRANGER.

St. James's Park.-Entering by the steps near the Duke of York's column, in Waterloo Place, or by the Horse Guards, in Whitehall, the parade is before us. The guard is relieved here every morning at ten o'clock,-a noble sight. Of the official buildings, before which the troops are drawn up, while bands are playing, the central is the Horse Guards, the northern the Admiralty, the southern the Treasury. On the parade are two remarkable pieces of ordnance—the one, a cannon of some fifteen feet in length, captured in 1801, by the British Army in Egypt; the other, a mortar, cast by order of Napoleon, used at the siege of Cadiz, and abandoned by the French after the battle of Salamanca. Passing westward there are four routes,one on each side of the water within the enclosure, with devious paths, amidst pleasant shrubberies, each conducting into the carriage roads. The time in the evening at which the enclosure is closed is regulated according to the season. The carriageroad on the north is bounded by Carlton House Terrace (a front of splendid houses on the site of Carlton House), by Marlborough House (now used for the Vernon Gallery), by St. James's Palace, and by Stafford House. The southern road is bounded by Queen Square, the Wellington Barracks, the Stationery Office, &c. From Buckingham Palace the carriage-road leads up Constitution Hill;-the paths through the Green Park conduct into Piccadilly, or to the gate near the triumphal arch at Hyde Park Corner, which is surmounted by the colossal equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington. The roads of St. James's Park are not accessible to any carriages but those of owners having a special privilege, with the exception of the southern road from Parliament Street to Buckingham Gate. The park is open to pedestrians till ten o'clock in the summer months, and nine in the winter.

Hyde Park-Hackney coaches and cabs are excluded from this park, but private carriages and horsemen have free entrance. Paths, kept in nice order, intersect it in various directions. Having crossed the road by Apsley House, the mansion of the Duke of Wellington, the park is entered by one of the triple archways. The bronze statue of Achilles (as it is called), which stands near the gates, was erected in 1822, by a subscription of the women of England, in honour of "Arthur, Duke of Wellington, and his brave companions in arms;" and was cast from cannon taken in the

Peninsular War. We assume that the stranger has entered Hyde Park after passing through St. James's and the Green Parks. But if he visits this park without reference to its immediate connection with the others, he may enter from Stanhope Gate, or Grosvenor Gate, which open to Park Lane, or from Cumberland Gate, at the western end of Oxford Street. Close by Cumberland Gate is an iron plate, with the inscription, "Here stood Tyburn turnpike." This was the common place of execution, and here Oliver Cromwell, one of the greatest of English rulers, was consigned to ignominious earth by one of the most profligate and unpatriotic of hereditary kings. Crossing by the path from Cumberland Gate you reach the vestiges of the Ring. Advancing towards the Serpentine there are fine old trees, which have lived through many changes of dynasties and fashions. Passing along the edge of the Serpentine you will reach the bridge with a double road,-one for the park, the other for Kensington Gardens. On the centre of the bridge pause to contemplate the view-Westminster Abbey and the New Houses of Parliament rising up in the distance. After the bridge is passed, the enclosure for the great Palace of Industry soon meets the eye. In a few months its crystal roofs will glitter in the sun-a wondrous work. To reach this spot the pedestrian has choice of many routes. He that travels in public carriages had better alight at the Albert Gate, in Knightsbridge, or the Princes' Gate, in Kensington Gore.

Regent's Park.-Entering from the gate opposite Portland Place, the Diorama and the Colosseum are soon reached-two of our most attractive exhibitions. The gardens of the Botanical Society lie to the west, in the inner circle; at the north-eastern side are the gardens of the Zoological Society. All these places of public resort may be approached with hired carriages. The many paths which cross the park are admirably kept.

Victoria Park.-The nearest practicable approach to this park from the west end, or from the heart of the city, is by Bethnal Green, to which place omnibuses are frequent from the Bank. There is a direct road to the park from Bethnal Green.

Richmond Park can be reached by railway from the Station in the Waterloo Road, by omnibuses, and by steam-boats; Greenwich Park by railway from London Bridge Station, by steam-boat, and by omnibuses, through every hour of the day.