II. GARDENS. KENSINGTON GARDENS. THE history of the public gardens in and near London, since the sixteenth century, illustrates, with tolerable completeness, the history of the changes of taste in gardening, and the general tenor of its progress. During the reign of Charles II., Greenwich Park and St. James's Park were laid out under the direction of the eminent French landscape designer, Le Nôtre, who had been invited to this country by Charles, with the express view of introducing the splendid French style. William III., not long after his accession to the throne, purchased from Daniel, second Earl of Nottingham, his house and gardens at Kensington. Kensington Gardens were commenced by William, who stamped upon them the impress of his own, and we believe, it may be added, the national tastes of the time; when in our gardens all sorts of "vegetable sculpture,"-the "wonders of the sportive shears Fair Nature mis-adorning, there were found; In living box, by cunning artists traced; And galleys trim, on no long voyage bound, But by their roots there ever anchor'd fast."-G. West. From notes made on the gardens round the metropolis, by J. Gibson, in 1691, it appears the sovereign's example was still followed with dutiful exactness; the characteristics of them all were terrace walks, hedges of evergreens, shorn shrubs in boxes, and orange and myrtle trees. Kensington Gardens as yet comprised but twenty-six acres, to which Queen Anne added thirty more, and caused them to be laid out by Wise, who turned the gravel-pits into a shrubbery, with winding walks. 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 parterres and flower gardens are epigrammatists and sonnetteers in this art; contrivers of bowers and grottos, 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 pleasant 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." It was about this time that there arose in different quarters a more natural taste in gardening, and which, as the commencement of our present system, has excited considerable interest and a great deal of not very conclusive discussion. One of the sources to which this taste is attributed by foreigners is odd enough-the Chinese; but our own poets seem much better entitled to whatever amount of credit may be justly assignable to any particular quarter. From Bacon downwards, we find them exercising a steady and growing influence to this end. That greatest of prose-poets expressly inculcated the adding to our gardens rude or neglected spots as specimens of wild nature, and he placed gardening on a higher elevation than was dreamed of by any one else in his time in the passage, "When ages do grow to civility and elegance, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection." Waller, at his residence at Beaconsfield, is said to have presented more than usual evidences of natural taste. Addison is the author of the paper 'On the Causes of the Pleasures of the Imagination, arising from the works of Nature, and their superiority over those of Art,' which appeared in 1712; and Pope, of that in which the verdant sculpture school is unmercifully attacked in the 'Guardian.' In his epistle to Lord Burlington he laid down the opposite principles that were to be cultivated,―the study of nature, the genius of the place, and never to lose sight of good sense. The first artist who appreciated and accepted the new faith was Bridgman, who banished verdant sculpture from the royal gardens, introduced "ha-has" instead of walls for boundaries, and portions of landscape scenery, in accordance with Bacon's ideas, but the clipped alleys were still left to be clipped. Queen Caroline, the wife of George II., was the boldest improver of Kensington Gardens. Under the superintendance of Bridgman, they were enlarged, by the addition of no less than three hundred acres taken out of Hyde Park, and the Serpentine was formed from a series of detached ponds. 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 £6000. 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, 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. In our own days, several changes have been made in the gardens, with a view to the greater public enjoyment of them. The chief of these is an exquisite walk of flowers and shrubs, extending from the central avenue, along the southern boundary of the gardens. The numerous plants are distinguished by inscriptions, bearing their botanical and common names, the country where they are indigenous,—and the date of their introduction. Here, then, may lessons of botany be acquired in the pleasantest manner; and those who come to "recreate themselves," find practical instruction. An imaginative writer in 'The Land we live in,' has thus described the effects upon his mind of Kensington Gardens in their summer beauty:-" It was an evening in July; one of those wondrously rich glowing sunsets which bathe the world in glory, when we found ourselves wandering through Kensington Gardens. Suddenly we came out in front of those grand old cedars of Lebanon, which so richly darken the green sward in the western part of the gardens, near the palace, in one of its most lovely and least-frequented spots. The gorgeous light was fully upon them at their tops, while beneath you saw through long and low vistas, far away in the distance, stretching along and touching the ground, a line of rosy light, of the loveliest conceivable hue, and barred perpendicularly by the black slender-looking tree trunks. As we turned away, after a long, silent, reverential study of the scene in that direction, another of a different kind arrested the eye. An artist was at work upon those cedars, aiming doubtless to catch and fix for ever that wondrous combination of form and colour which they then presented. He was seated on a low portable gardenstool, and leaned his back against one of the garden seats, on which sat a lady, with a book in her hands, and with her head bending down towards him, reading in a low and musical voice-what, we knew not, nor cared to know; it could not be more beautiful or suggestive to the heart and mind of man than the scene in which they were, and to which their appreciation of it, so luxuriously complete, lent a new charm. And then it was that once more dawned upon us a fresh sense of the particular beauty of these gardens, and of the privilege which all may enjoy of walking in them, as well as of the apparent unconsciousness of so many men and women who might benefit by them,—of what they lose by their neglect to do so. "We strolled on through the flower-walk, with its choice collection of trees and shrubs, and felt that we never saw so plainly before the peculiar beauties and characteristics of each; we ranged in vision over the sylvan glades on the left, climbed in the same way the magnificent trees, and were again arrested by the scene-unequalled surely anywhere-that presented itself at the eastern extremity of the gardens, where you look over the low wall, with its sunken fosse, or ha-ha! beyond to the well-known Rotten Row, that divides the gardens from the park. In that road, ranged in almost military precision and silence, was drawn up a long line of horsemen and horsewomen, who had quitted for the moment the army of mounted irregulars to which they belonged, and who kept sweeping to and fro in the rear: our modern domestic chivalry-in a word, the flower of the male and female aristocracy of England. Inside and lining the garden wall, and thus protected from any sudden inroad from the "Row," or promenading up and down the broad walk, or thickly covering the green lawn on the left, or grouped picturesquely a little farther off, or scattered more and more sparingly as the eye compassed a greater distance, we looked upon hundreds of fair women, arrayed in colours sportive and brilliant and varied as the rainbow, and which would have been almost as harmonious, but for the |