steamers, with their threepenny fares, or their freights for distant ports. There, is a 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 shadowyvenerable 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.

THE NEW TWE PUBLIC LIBRADY

ASTUR, LANE HILDAN FOUNDA

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;
Globes, spiral columns, pyramids, and piers
With spouting urns and budding statues crown'd,
And horizontal dials on the ground,

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