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entry is not much earlier than that of the notice of the alterations made by Charles II. 1660, July 22nd. Went to walk in the inward park, but could not get in; one man was basted by the keeper for carrying some people over on his back through the water." If the reader will consult one of the earlier maps of London, he will find a long, narrow, four-cornered piece of water introduced behind the tilt-yard, extending nearly from side to side of the park, at right angles to the direction of the canal constructed in the time of Charles II. This apparently is the piece of water across which the crowd attempted to get themselves smuggled on the occasion referred to by Pepys into the inward park."

So long as the tilt-yard maintained its interest, the space beyond it would have few attractions for the gazing public. On either side of the park there was a place of resort preferred by the loungers of the times anterior to the Restoration-Spring Garden and the Mulberry Garden. The period at which Spring Garden was enclosed and laid out is uncertain. The clump of houses which still bears the name, indicates its limits with tolerable exactness. The Mulberry Garden was planted by order of James I., who attempted in 1608 to produce silk in England, and to that end imported many hundred thousand mulberry-trees from France. In 1629 a grant was made to Walter, Lord Aston, &c., of " the custody of the garden, mulberry-trees, and silkworms, near St. James's, in the county of Middlesex." How soon after this the silkworms disappeared and the gardens were opened to the gay world, does not appear. Buckingham House, which stood where the central part of the palace now stands, was erected by John, Duke of Buckingham, in 1703, and the Mulberry Garden attached to the house as private property.

After Charing Cross had become more and more connected by lines of buildings with the City, and private dwelling-houses had multiplied along three sides of the Park by Pall Mall and King Street, and the streets behind Queen Square, and when tournaments fell into disuse, the temptation to penetrate into the recesses of the park would increase. In the time of Charles I. a sort of royal menagerie had begun to take the place of the deer with which the "inward park" was stocked in the days of Henry and Elizabeth.

With the restoration of Charles II. begins the era of the park's existence as a public haunt, and materials for its history become accessible. The design according to which the park was laid out has been generally attributed to Le Notre. Charles seems to have set to work with its adornment immediately on his return. We can trace the progress of the operations in Pepys's Diary :'

“1660, Sept. 16. * * * To the park, where I saw how far they had proceeded in the Pall Mall, and in making a river through the park which I had never seen before since it was begun. * * * October 11. To walk in St. James's Park, where we observed the several engines at work to draw up water, with which sight I was very much pleased. Above all the rest I liked that which Mr. Greatorex brought, which do carry up the water with a great deal of ease. * * * 1661. August 4. *** Walked into St. James's Park (where I had not been a great while), and there found great and very noble alterations. *** 1662. July 27. I went to walk in the park, which is now every day more and more pleasant by the new works upon it."

All the future representations of the park during the reign of Charles II., exhibit to us his long rows of young elm and lime-trees, fenced round with palings to protect them from injury. We have such a row in front of the old Horse Guards, and another such following the line of the canals. These are occasionally relieved by some fine old trees, as in Tempest's view, in the title-page of this number.

The elegance of the park transformed into a garden, with the attractions of the

rare animals for the curious and the mall for the gamesters, rendered it immediately the favourite haunt of the court. The mall (a vista half a mile in length) received its name from a game at ball, for which was formed a hollow smooth walk, enclosed on each side by a border of wood, and having an iron hoop at one extremity. The curiously inquiring Mr. Pepys records :-"1663. May 15, I walked in the park, discoursing with the keeper of the Pall-mall, who was sweeping of it; who told me that the earth is mixed that do floor the mall, and that over all there is cockle-shells powdered and spread to keep it fast; which, however, in dry weather turns to dust and deads the ball." The game was, however, played somewhat differently, even in the park.

St. James's Park is intimately associated with anecdotes of the private life of Charles II. Cibber tells us, that "his indolent amusement of playing with his dogs and feeding his ducks in St. James's Park (which I have seen him do) made the common people adore him." He was an early riser; which was sorely complained of by his attendants, who did not sleep off their debauches so lightly. Burnet complained that the king walked so fast, it was a trouble to keep up with him. When Prince George of Denmark complained on one occasion that he was growing fat, "Walk with me," said Charles, "and hunt with my brother, and you will not long be distressed with growing fat." Dr. King, on the authority of Lord Cromarty, has enabled us to accompany the merry monarch in one of his walks. The king, accompanied by the Duke of Leeds and Lord Cromarty, had taken two or three turns in St. James's Park, and after proceeding up Constitution Hill, which was then quite in the country, he encountered the Duke of York returning from hunting as he was about to cross into Hyde Park. The Duke alighted to pay his respects, and expressed his uneasiness at seeing his brother with so small an attendance: "No kind of danger, James," said Charles, "for I am sure no man in England would kill me to make you king." Another of the merry monarch's strolls in the park is characteristic, and rendered more piquant by the decorous character of the narrator, Evelyn, in whose company he was at the time :-"1671. March 1. *** I thence walked with him (King Charles) through St. James's Park to the garden, where I both saw and heard a very familiar discourse between Mrs. Nellie, as they call an impudent comedian, she looking out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall, and *** *** (sic in orig.) standing on the green walk under it. I was heartily sorry at this scene. Thence the king walked to the Duchess of Cleveland, another lady of pleasure and curse of our nation." During this interview with "Mrs. Nellie the king was standing in the royal garden which constituted the northern boundary of the park. "Mrs. Nellie" looked down upon him from the wall of a small garden behind her house (near 79, Pall-mall). Perhaps, however, a little incident related by Coke is even more characteristic of Charles, from its contrasting his loitering gossiping habits with public and private suffering. Coke was one day in attendance on the king, who, having finished feeding his favourites, was proceeding towards St. James's, and was overtaken at the further end of the mall by Prince Rupert. "The king told the prince how he had shot a duck, and such a dog fetched it; and so they walked on till the king came to St. James's House: and there the king said to the prince, 'Let's go and see Cambridge and Kendal,'-the Duke of York's two sons, who then lay a-dying. But upon his return to Whitehall he found all in an uproar, the Countess Castlemaine, as it was said, bewailing above all others that she should be the first torn in pieces." The news of the arrival of the Dutch fleet in the river had just been received. Pepys gives in his 'Diary' a fine picture of a court cavalcade in the park, all flaunting with feathers, in which the same Castlemaine takes a

prominent part, while the king appears between her and his lawful wife and Mrs. Stuart (with reverence be it spoken) not unlike Macheath "with his doxies around." Pepys often encounters, also, Charles's brother, the Duke of York, in the park, but always actively engaged :-"1661. April 2. To St. James's Park, where I saw the Duke of York playing at pall-mall, the first time that I ever saw the sport." And -"1662. Dec. 15. To the duke, and followed him into the park, where, though the ice was broken, he would go slide upon his skaits, which I did not like, but he slides very well." Skating was then a novelty among us. It is probable that some of the exiled cavaliers had acquired the art while seeking to while away the tedium of a Dutch winter.

After the death of Charles II. St. James's Park ceased to be the favourite haunt of the sovereign. The burning of Whitehall, by occasioning the removal of the court, may in part account for this-in part, the less gossiping turn of succeeding sovereigns. But the love of their subjects for this pleasing lounge has been more lasting. In the last century, when the distinctions of rank were more marked by dress, "the toe of the peasant" came somewhat too near "the courtier." Walpole writes, "My Lady Coventry and my niece Waldegrave have been mobbed in the park." The gradual rise in refinement amongst all orders in society, now renders such a place of public resort safe for all and offensive to none; no insult for the great, no contumely for the lowly. The improvements effected in the time of George IV. were for the people, and they abuse not their own possession. The ornamented grounds are kept with the nicest care, uninjured by any rude trespassers; the water-fowl are confided to the protection of the public. The relief of the guard on the parade attracts a crowd of idlers of all denominations, but there is no disorder. Civility has become a marked characteristic of all classes of the people. By night, as by day, the park is now secure. It was lighted by gas in 1822.

HYDE PARK.

Hyde Park, the Green and St. James's Parks, may be regarded as forming part of an uninterrupted space of open pleasure-ground. This is not so apparent now that they only touch with their angles, but it was otherwise before the ground on which Apsley House and Hamilton Place stand was taken from Hyde Park. Even yet the isthmus which connects them, where Hyde Park Gate and the gate at the top of Constitution Hill front each other, is only attenuated, not intersected. They have, moreover, since the Revolution been invariably intrusted to the care of the same ranger.

Each of these parks has its own peculiar character. St. James's, lying among palaces, and hedged round on all sides from a comparatively early period by the fashionable residences of the "West End," is the courtier. Hyde Park, not yet quite surrounded by the town, and decidedly extending into a rural neighbourhood, is the "fine old country gentleman," essentially stately and noble, and a courtier too on occasions, yet with a dash of rusticity. Hemmed in though this 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 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 unscen

By hedge-row elms on hillock green,
Right against the eastern gate
Where the great sun begins his state,
Robed in flames and amber light,
The clouds in thousand liveries dight,
While the ploughman near at hand
Whistles o'er the furrow'd land;
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,

And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dalc."

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. There was present his Highness the Lord Protector, many of his Privy Council, and divers eminent gentlemen, to whose view was presented great agility of body, and most neat and exquisite wrestling, at every meeting of one with the other, which was ordered with such dexterity, that it was to show more the strength, vigour and nimbleness of their bodies than to endanger their persons. The ball they played withal was silver, and designed for that party which did win the goal." Evelyn, in May, 1658, "went to see a coach-race in Hide Park ;" and Pepys mentions in August, 1660, "To Hide Parke by coach, and saw a fine foot-race three times round the park." Evelyn's coach-race recalls an accident which happened

to Cromwell in Hyde Park, in 1654. Ludlow's version of this story is:-"The Duke of Holstein made him (Cromwell) a present of a set of grey Friesland coachhorses; with which taking the air in the park, attended only with his secretary Thurloe, and a guard of Janizaries, he would needs take the place of the coachman, not doubting but the three pair of horses he was about to drive would prove as tame as the three nations which were ridden by him; and therefore, not content with their ordinary pace, he lashed them very furiously. But they, unaccustomed to such a rough driver, ran away in a rage, and stopped not till they had thrown him out of the box, with which fall his pistol fired in his pocket, though without any hurt to himself: by which he might have been instructed how dangerous it was to meddle with those things wherein he had no experience." Cromwell seems to have been partial to Hyde Park and its environs. The " Weekly Post,' enumerating the occasions on which Syndercombe and Cecill had lain in wait to assassinate him in Hyde Park ("the hinges of Hyde Park Gate were filed off in order to their escape"), enumerates some of his airings all in this neighbourhood :-" when he rode to Kensington and thence the back way to London ;" "when he went to Hide Park in his coach;" 66 when he went to Turnham Green and so by Acton home;" and "when he rode in Hide Park." One could fancy him influenced by some attractive sympathy between his affections and the spot of earth in which he was destined to repose from his stirring and harassing career. The unmanly indignities offered to his dead body harmed not him, and they who degraded themselves by insulting the dead were but a sort of sextons more hardened and brutal than are ordinarily to be met with. Cromwell sleeps as sound at Tyburn, in the vicinity of his favourite haunts, as the rest of our English monarchs sleep at Westminster or Windsor.

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 the rougher business of life. During the time of the Commonwealth it became private property. Evelyn (11th April, 1653) complains feelingly of the change:-"I went to take the aire in Hyde Park, where every coach was made to pay a shilling, and horse sixpence, by the sordid fellow (Anthony Deane, of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, Esq.) who had purchased it of the state, as they are called." Mr. Hamilton, the ranger appointed at the Restoration, 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.

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 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." Walpole laughs at a review of the militia in 1759. 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. 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.