by Walter Thornbury.
Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.3 #12 (Oct 1867).
II. St. James's Park—Hyde Park
The two guns on the Parade deserve a little further notice. The long Egyptian gun (Despard's) has inscriptions on it in Turkish, praying Allah to direct the shot straight in the faces of the accursed eaters of that unclean animal, the pig; but the infidel is like Gallio, he cares for none of these things, and the cannon is now his trophy. The carriage is of English construction, and its ornaments are emblematical of the land of the Sphinx.
The great mortar from Cadiz, which we partly described in our last chapter, can throw a shell three miles, but it was in 1819 popularly supposed to have a range of sixteen miles. The Spanish Government, thinking it rather a chef-d'œuvre of artillery, sent it to our worthy Prince Regent, by the Hon. Rear-Admiral Legge, who was instructed by the Duke del Infantada to request it might be placed in one of the royal parks. It was therefore built up on the Parade, to record the victory of Salamanca and Wellington's liberation of the south of Spain.
The Earl of Mulgrave had the carriage made at Woolwich in 1814. It weighs sixteen tons, is nine feet high and nine feet long. The mortar is mounted at its proper angle of 45 degrees—the angle at which a candle ought to be snuffed. The carriage is emblematical, and represents the guardian monster Geryon, the tyrant of Gades, whom Hercules destroyed. Geryon in this case meant Napoleon, and Hercules the Duke of Wellington. Some of the heads of the beast are asleep and some awake, to represent perpetual watchfulness. In the principal figure wings are put instead of heads, and the tail twists round to the vent to carry the fire. The inscription is in Latin for those who cannot read English, and in English for those who cannot read Latin. The English one runs thus:
"To commemorate the raising of the siege of Cadiz, in consequence of the glorious victory obtained by the Duke of Wellington over the French near Salamanca on the 22d July 1812,—this mortar, cast for the destruction of that great port, with powers surpassing all others, and abandoned by the besiegers on their retreat, was presented, as a token of respect and gratitude by the Spanish nation, to his royal highness the Prince Regent."
In the front of the bed is the crest and motto of the Prince, who seems to have received the thanks of the Spaniards (for the way in which his subjects poured out their blood and treasure) with the most amiable condescension. In later life, when rather clouded with wine, the Prince used seriously to describe how he led the great final charge at Waterloo—perhaps he also persuaded himself that he raised the siege of Cadiz; and Wellington was not the man to contradict him.
After all, it is a poor trophy of a great battle; there is always a smallness and meanness about the treatment of such things in England. If the French had won a Waterloo, they'd have tumbled a heap of cannon together, and on a bronze rock in the midst of them reared a Mars exulting in victory, with his sword raised to heaven.
The Horse-Guards were first raised by Charles II., and their barracks were built here, on the site of part of the old Tilt-yard. The present building replaced them in 1751. The design is attributed to that successful charlatan Kent, but it is broken into complex forms more after the manner of Vanbrugh. The archway into the Park is sombre and tame. The Secretary of War, the Commander-in-chief, the Adjutant-general, and the Quartermaster-general have all offices here. In the audience-room facing the Park, the Commander-in-chief holds his levees; the room contains fine portraits by Gainsborough of George III. and his very plain wife, and a bust of the Duke of York. In the grand mess-room there is a portrait of that rather wild nobleman, Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who was commander of the Blues in Charles II.'s time.
The Horse-Guards clock, which has a great name for military punctuality, and indeed rivals St. Paul's for exactitude, was originally made by Thwaites, in 1756. It is a thirty-hour clock, striking the quarters on two bells, and showing time on two dials, illuminated at night—one facing the Parade, the other Whitehall. The works were made new in 1815-16, by Vulliamy, the royal clockmaker. The clock is wound, but not set, every day, and it is as regular as the stars, which is saying a good deal. There is a brass plate under the pendulum, with an inscription intimating that Viscount Palmerston ordered the clock to be repaired in 1816, and added the seconds-hand: so even eminent men are not always disdainful of small churchwarden honours.
The two mounted soldiers in the stone hermitages opposite Whitehall are dear to every old Londoner who can remember the awe with which as a boy he used to stare at those armed statues, and wonder if they and their horses were really alive. What a relief it was to us, we well remember, when we saw the white in the eye of one of the men in the helmet and cuirass twinkle grimly if a boy came across the road towards the guard-room with a large pewter pot crowned with snowy froth in either hand! How solemn the black horse stood in the shadow; how massy the helmet looked; how cruelly keen the sword over the shoulder! As we grew older, this place used to arouse in us strange thoughts of that cave in the old Spanish ballads, into which the shepherd boy ventured, and found long vaulted corridors lined on either side with sleeping horsemen, who were waiting for one blast of the magic and predestined horn to awake and free Spain from the Moors.
These blue and scarlet warriors are relieved every hour. The guard is on duty here every day from ten till four. At the end of every hour the doors in the rear open as in a Dutch clock; the two relieving horsemen enter, and those relieved ride gravely out in front, describe a semicircle, meet, and then ride side by side, like two good comrades as they are, through the central gate back to their stables. At four o'clock every day a military ceremony takes place in the front enclosure of the Horse-Guards—a ceremony, no doubt, very essential to discipline, but to the foolish civilian eye only a palpable piece of routine. The men, in glittering plumed helmets and cuirasses shining like looking-glasses, ride out one by one in a bored, indifferent sort of way, and range into line. Then a very young, still more bored, officer rides up and down the ranks, front and back, and is supposed to observe the shine and position of every belt and sword-knot. He gives one or two words of command in a languid suffering voice, expressive of the last degree of exhaustion, and the men ride complacently back to the stables much edified. But to see the men really alive, and doing something essential, unimportant as it may be in a strategic sense, you must meet a troop of Blues or Reds riding up to Whitehall from Knightsbridge or Regent's Park. Then they look in earnest—helmets in a row, swords in a line, cuirasses side by side, the trumpeters and kettledrummers gorgeous in crimson velvet and gold lace.
Stupendous, too, are those dismounted men in impossible boots, who, carbines in hand and faces all gloomed by their helmets, so that eyes and forehead are lost, pace under the dim archways—the very Mars and Apollo of all nursemaids, and indeed, to even less impressionable and less tender beings, very splendid specimens of the genus homo; terrible and overwhelming in the charge, but perhaps less really useful than those wiry middle-sized men who, in the retreat from Moscow, were found to survive hardships under which the giant cuirassiers too soon succumbed.
Returning to the Mall after our ramble round the guns, let us for a moment turn back to the swarthy king, whose strange hard-lined face is so indelibly associated with this Park. Grave Mr. Evelyn, on March 2d, 1671, attended the king through the Park, and was rather shocked to see Charles hold a familiar discourse with an impudent comedian, Mrs. Nelly (Nell Gwynn); she looking out of her garden on a terrace, a portion of which was still visible in 1855 close to the park-wall of Marlborough House, the king standing on the green walk under it. Pepys, in his important quaint way, mentions once abstracting some apples from the royal garden, then the northern boundary of the Park. The same writer describes a court cavalcade in the Park in which Charles appeared, his poor neglected queen out-flaunted by the audacious Countess of Castlemaine and the beautiful Mrs. Stewart, for the latter of whom the king and the Duke of Richmond were rivals.
It was while walking in the Mall (we forgot to mention in our last) that Charles was first met by Mr. Kirby, a chemist, one of Titus Oates's infamous gang. The place was ingeniously selected, it being the pleasure-seeking monarch's favourite lounge with his dogs, parasites, and mistresses. He had already had some taste of plots, for that sturdy scoundrel Blood had once hidden in the reeds near Battersea to shoot him while bathing; and the Fifth-monarchy Men had conspired perpetually, till a certain mad wine-cooper brought things to a head, and broke out in the City a year after the Restoration to proclaim the approaching victory of the Saints over the Cavaliers. It was while the balls were flying over the Mall that Kirby came up, and drawing the king aside, whispered, "Sir, keep within the company; your enemies have a design upon your life, and you may be shot in this very walk."
But Kirby was the mere prologue-speaker of the plot; for then came that hideous, triple-chinned wretch Oates, a degraded naval chaplain, who, disclosing pretended Jesuit conspiracies, so humoured the public alarm at the Roman Catholics and the Portuguese queen and her monks, that he, Beddoes, and Tongue contrived to bring many an innocent man to the scaffold. Charles was afraid to appear lukewarm in such a cause, the polished royal rogue being all the time himself in the pay of France, and a rank Papist in heart. At last, but too late, the reaction came; James mounted the rickety throne, and poor Titus mounted the pillory at Charing Cross, and was flogged at the cart's-tail from there to Newgate.
Charles II. was a fast walker, having probably accustomed himself to long promenades to wile away the time during his weary days of exile in Holland, France, and Germany. Even poor time-serving Burnet used to complain that he could not keep up with the king, so as to be at the proper courtier's distance from his left ear. Prince George of Denmark—that dull, selfish man, who married an equally selfish and unmeaning person, afterwards Queen Anne—Est-il possible? as he was generally called by the wits from his one invariable exclamation at all remarks—once complained to Charles that he was growing too fat. "Walk with me every day," replied the king, "and hunt with my brother James, and I'll engage you'll not long be distressed with that malady."
In Charles's time every true Tory who believed in the divine right of kings, as long as the king did not seize his property, entertained the superstitious belief that the touch of the king could cure the evil. For such touching there were regular days appointed. Shakespeare alludes to the practice in King James's time, and in Queen Anne's reign Dr. Johnson when a child was taken to be touched by the stately lady in black velvet and diamonds. A certain Jones Evans, a Welshman, not caring to wait for the day of ceremonial, once pushed his way through Charles's retinue on the Mall, knelt, kissed the royal hand, and then rubbed it, to the king's horror, against his bulbous nose. "It disturbed the king," says that credulous gossip Aubrey; "but it cured Evans."
King William first opened the passage through Spring-gardens in 1699. Rosamond's Pond, once painted by Hogarth, as Mr. Timbs, that admirable collector of the best antiquarian chat, informs us, was filled up in 1770. After the death of Charles IT., St. James's began to wane before the glories of Hyde Park. It still, however, remained a favourite promenade for the people, and, being privileged from arrest, was a great resort for broken-down beaux, penniless captains, and what Haynes Bailey calls, in one of his pleasant songs, "gentlemen in diffs." The strolling-player walked there and studied when other people were leaving for dinner; lingered there to try to forget he had an appetite, rather than to whet one already sufficiently active. Dinnerless Jack Spindle and Beau Tibbs, who "blasted himself with vivacity" on seeing "nobody in town," we have already mentioned as characters Goldsmith met on the Park seats. We had almost forgotten to mention one of the least known, and yet pleasantest associations of the Park. It is a story of platonic love in George II.'s time, and it connects the Mall with the memory of that amiable old egotist Samuel Richardson, the author of Pamela, Clarissa Harlow, and Sir Charles Grandison. This worthy man, a thrifty and prosperous printer in Salisbury-court, who contrived to write his pathetic, yet too prolix, novels in the intervals of business, was known to all the eminent men of his age, and more especially to Dr. Young, Dr. Johnson, Aaron Hill, and Arthur Onslow, the Speaker of the House of Commons. It was at his house that Hogarth saw Dr. Johnson rolling his eyes and rocking his head in indignation at the cruelties shown by the Whigs to the Jacobite prisoners; and the little painter took the leviathan of literature for a madman, so wild and eccentric were his gestures and movements. Mr. Charles Knight, in a recent very pleasant work, has given us an excellent and quietly humorous picture of the grave author, in full square-cut dress and lace ruffles, grievously interrupted by the din in his printing-office occasioned by the compositors "cobbing" a refractory apprentice.
In 1748, when Richardson was fifty-nine years of age, his unconquerable vanity led him into a long platonic correspondence with one of his numerous female admirers—a Lady Bradsheigh, the wife of a Leicestershire baronet, who had written to him in a sentimentally coquettish manner under the assumed name of Mrs. Balfour. The lady began the playful correspondence, after the appearance of the fourth volume of Clarissa Harlow, by begging the author not to make the catastrophe fatal to the happiness of Clarissa and Lovelace.
"May the hatred," she says with pretty enthusiasm,—"may the hatred of all the young, beautiful, and virtuous for ever be your portion, and may your eyes never behold anything but age and deformity! May you meet with applause only from envious old maids, surly bachelors, and tyrannical parents! May you be doomed to the company of such, and after death may their ugly souls haunt you! Now make Lovelace and Clarissa unhappy if you dare."
What a charming defiance!
The lady comes to town, and Richardson sends her his verbal portrait, that she may know her correspondent if he passes her on his way to his house at Fulham.
The picture is clear in its colour and sharp in its outline as a study by Teniers. He describes himself as "short, rather plump than emaciated, about five foot five inches high; fair wig, lightish cloth coat, all black besides; with one hand generally in his bosom, the other with a cane in it, which he leans upon under the skirts of his coat usually, that it may imperceptibly serve him as a support when attacked by sudden tremors or startings and dizziness; and of a light-brown complexion, teeth not yet failing him; smooth-faced and ruddy-cheeked; at some times looking to be about sixty-five, at other times much younger; a regular, even pace, stealing away ground rather than seeming to get rid of it; a gray eye, too often over-clouded by mistiness from the head; by chance lively,—very lively it will be if he have hope of serving a lady whom he loves and honours: his eye is always on the ladies."
The worthy old Malvolio then goes on to describe how he reviews the ladies he meets in the Mall, first glancing at their feet, his eye then rising slowly to their faces,—if the first look invites curiosity.
The lady also attempts her own portrait, with an affected self-depreciation which is delightfully dishonest. She is of middle age, not remarkably ill-favoured; has a face of a brown wainscot colour (a charming brunette, no doubt),—and so on, in a very pretty inventory. We are afraid this wicked Mistress Page made rather a fool of the gallant vain old gentleman; for he seems to have spent hours promenading the Mall in hopes of either seeing the fair incognita, or being seen by her. His walks to North End were much delayed by his platonic anxieties, and he begs—but in vain—for an interview or a visit. Once, she writes; she felt all in a flutter, as she walked the Mall yesterday with some friends, at seeing someone very like her correspondent approach; but then he had a whitish and not a gray coat. Into much mischievous entanglement of innocent coquetting did this cruel Lady Bradsheigh lead the worthy old printer of Salisbury-square. He meets her, but he does not recognise her. She describes the mole on his left cheek, to show that she has really seen him; and then talks of his picture at Mr. Highmore's, where perhaps the tormenting, flattering creature after all obtained this hint. Then he invites her and her "dear man" down to North End, and she invites him down to Lancashire, where she does not really live. If he had been Lovelace himself, the lady could not have vexed and fretted him more cruelly. The treatment would have ruffled the temper even of that intolerably respectable prig, Sir Charles Grandison. After all, we believe they never met.
On the 2d of August 1786, St. James's Park was the scene of an event that alarmed the whole nation. There was a levee that day at St. James's Palace, and the king (George III.) had just driven up to the garden-entrance, having posted fast from Windsor. His majesty was just alighting, when a neatly-dressed old woman pushed forward and presented a petition. The king was taking it in his usual kind fussy way, when the woman drew a table-knife from her bosom, and struck at his breast, cutting the waistcoat. She was about to strike again, when one of the yeomen caught her arm, and at the same instant one of the royal footmen wrenched the knife from her hand. The king, with good-nature and temper, exclaimed, "I am not hurt; take care of the poor woman; do not harm her;" and proceeded to the levee quite calm and undisturbed.
The poor madwoman proved to be Margaret Nicholson, a woman who had been a nobleman's servant; she latterly had lodged at Mr. Fisk's, a stationer in Wigmore-street, and had lived by taking in plain work. That same day she was examined before the Privy Council, who at once discovered the special form of her insanity.
She all at once broke out, "The crown is mine! I want nothing but my right; and if I don't get my right, England will be drowned in blood for a thousand generations."
Mr. Fisk had not observed any signs of insanity in her, except that she talked to herself a great deal, and was very reserved. When asked where she had lived last, she screamed frantically, "I have been all abroad since the matter of the crown broke out."
Poor Margaret was easily lured into Bedlam by the promise of a royal visit. Addresses of congratulation showered in upon the king, and so many knighthoods were conferred on loyal and disinterested mayors, that "Peg Nicholson's knights" became quite an order of knighthood in themselves. The king made light of the whole affair, but in rather an hysterical way. He joked about it clumsily, while the ugly, proud, but well-meaning queen, and half the ladies of the court burst into tears. The queen had not heard of the attempt, till the king himself entered her apartments at Windsor and exclaimed jovially, as if he had had rather an agreeable day of it, "Well, here I am, safe and well, though I have had a very narrow escape of being stabbed." (The knife had slightly cut his laced waistcoat.) And he remarked, "It was great good luck it did not go farther; there was nothing under it but some thin linen and a good deal of fat."
After all, Peg had only used a blunt, half worn-out dessert-knife; the danger had not been very formidable, but it frightened the queen a good deal, and she always persisted in thinking it the first step of a general assassination of kings by the democrats.
Peg's version of the story had the true cunning of Bedlam about it. She declared that the king visited in the families where she lived, and used often to look at her in a manner that bespoke kindness and regard, in fact "she had a great notion of him." Being for a long time out of a situation, it had struck her to petition the king to recommend her to a place. Unfortunately she had a knife in the pocket where she had placed the petition, and in her hurry she pulled them both out together. Poor creature! she survived all her knights and the king himself, who died stricken by her own malady. She lived nearly forty years in Bedlam. She took a dislike to bread, and subsisted for years on gingerbread and biscuits. Tea and snuff were her favourite luxuries. She was eventually removed to the aged and infirm ward, and was there regular, cleanly, industrious, quiet, and harmless, though subject to occasional irritations. She was living in 1823, still harbouring secret designs upon the crown, but very snuffy and very deaf.
Till the end of the last century, when manners lost somewhat of their old simplicity, fashionable people used to walk in the Mall for one or two hours after dinner; but the Row absorbs the gay world now, and the evening dinner (the old supper) prevents the Mall being much frequented, except by busy men passing through from the public offices to Kensington, Brompton, and Pimlico. That philosophical bookseller, Sir Richard Philips, laments this change in his pleasant Walk to Kew (1817).
"My spirits," he says, "sunk, and a tear started into my eyes, as I brought to mind those crowds of beauty, rank, and fashion, which, till within these few years, used to be displayed in the centre Mall of this Park on Sunday evenings during the spring and summer. How often in my youth had I been a delighted spectator of the enchanted and enchanting assemblage! Here used to promenade for one or two hours after dinner the whole British world of gaiety, beauty, and splendour. Here could be seen in one moving mass, extending the whole length of the Mall, five thousand of the most lovely women in this country of female beauty, all splendidly attired, and accompanied by as many well-dressed men. What a change, I exclaimed, has a few years wrought in these once happy and cheerful personages! How many of those who at this very spot once delighted my eyes are now mouldering in the silent grave!"
A little old-fashioned, perhaps, in sentiment, yet still full of the feeling of melancholy that sometimes comes over an old Londoner as he stands by the ceaseless stream of life, and remembers how long he has watched its flowing. Rogers used to say that many streets had become cemeteries to him—graveyards of memories; and he often thought of many a friendly door, at which, if he now knocked, strange faces would greet him. Thackeray had this feeling strongly, and his half-cynical regret is finely expressed in his ballad of the Bouillabaisse.
During the great Peace-rejoicings of 1814, so soon to be rudely broken by the trumpets of Waterloo, no visitor produced more excitement than that dogged old Prussian hussar, Blucher. When he arrived in St. James's Park in the Prince Regent's own carriage, and escorted by a squadron of light horse, the people were loud in their applause; he drove through the Horse-Guards arch to Carlton House. When the park-gates near the Regent's stables were thrown open for him, the mob rushed in, knocked down the sentinels, and overpowered the porter. Colonels Bloomfield and Congreve then came out in full regimentals, and, uncovered, led Blucher arm-in-arm to the front entrance, where the Prince received him. The people in Pall Mall, hearing the shouting in the Park, went stark mad, and scaled the walls and lodges, some of the gentlemen on horseback all but riding into the hall, in the centre of which the Prince was placing a blue ribbon over Blucher's shoulder. To this ribbon was attached a medallion likeness of the Regent set in diamonds. The people were in ecstasies at seeing Blucher kneel to receive this honour. Blucher then drove to his lodgings next the Duke of Cumberland's in St. James's Palace. Some of the crowd got into the carriage with him. The people remained in the palaceyard huzzaing till dark, Blucher showing himself in the window, and frequently bowing to the people. During his stay in London, the old general used to be constantly seen smoking his cigar tranquilly at his window, little thinking how soon his sabre would have to be drawn against his old enemies the French.
During the Peace-commemoration Fête, August 1st, the Mall and Birdeage Walk were lighted with coloured Chinese lanterns, the Regent having a special predilection for Chinese fantasies—a barbarous taste, which culminated in his hideous Pavilion at Brighton. The Prince contrived a naval engagement of toy ships on the canal, which was much ridiculed at the time. One wit described meeting two men with seventy-fours on their heads coming up Fleet-street. The Prince, who had all the vices and none of the virtues of Orientalism, revelled in spurious Chinese art. Give him a pagoda and a china mandarin, and he was happy. On this occasion, he had a Chinese bridge, with a seven-storied pagoda on it, thrown across the canal, hung with lamps, and lit by coloured fires. They pleased the people; but the fireworks discharged from the bridge set fire to the pagoda, destroyed its three upper stories, and burnt two workmen;—but what were two workmen to the magnificent Chinese-loving Prince? This pagoda-bridge was never rebuilt, and, soon falling into decay, was replaced by a cast-iron bridge, and lastly by the present ponderous and clumsy structure. At these same rejoicings a grand and trumpery Temple of Concord was built up in the Green Park. This was illuminated at night, and fireworks and cannon were discharged round it at intervals during the evening. When Canova the sculptor was asked what had most struck him during his visit to England, he replied, "That the trumpery Chinese bridge in St. James's Park should be the production of the Government, whilst that of Waterloo is the work of a private company."
The new road, says Mr. Timbs, writing in 1855, spoiled the uniformity of Birdcage Walk. The elms in this part of the Park were planted by a nursery gardener of Fulham, a patriarchal rearer of trees, who left behind him thirty-five children, and died in 1783, aged 101 years, in the room in which he was born. In 1833 the two Boscobel oaks were thrown down during a storm.
In 1827 (George IV.) the inner park was laid out in a more gay and modern style; the stiff formal canal, of the old monotonous Dutch style, was twisted into a winding lake; the borders were planted with evergreens scientifically labelled. It is, however, rather pedantic to label such common shrubs as the box and laurel; and no one but an Arab, we should surmise, could well mistake the elm and beech. The glimpse of the twin towers of the Abbey, and the great shaft of the Clock Tower, with its illuminated dials, that in a summer twilight gleams out like a full harvest-moon, are the great charms of this Park.
We must not forget to mention the Swiss Cottage of the Ornithological Society on the eastern island. It was built in 1841, with a grant of 300l. from the Lords of the Treasury. The cottage contains a council-room, keeper's apartments, and steam hatching-apparatus. In the island are feeding-places and decoys, and the ducks live here in clover, or, what is better, in marshy grasses, and are as happy as water-fowl can be. In 1849, an experimental crop of forty-day maize from the Pyrenees was grown and ripened successfully in this Park. Mr. Timbs, the indefatigable, informs us that for the privilege of farming the chairs in this Park 25l. a year is paid to the office of Woods and Forests.
Mr. Leigh Hunt, that intellectual epicurean, in his pleasant way describes his boyish recollections of the band in Palace-yard on Sunday mornings. Who can ever forget that exhilarating sight, which made war seem a mere glorious pageant for children and nursemaids? How the band-major, supernaturally pompous, and of the height of the grandfather of Anak, twirled, like a dancing juggler, his gilt-headed staff, as an Irishman would his shillelah! How full of the majesty of African kings, blended somehow with hazy reminiscences of Othello, stood the "turbaned black,"[1] who waved and recklessly clashed his golden cymbals! How extraordinary it was that a child of one's own age could tinkle silver music out of a triangle! How full of chic and graceful smartness were the fifers, with the blue fleur-de-lis stamped on the white lace stripes of their uniform! and then the tramp of the undulating lines of others with bayonets was grand, with its dead monotonous sound underlying the music!
West, the painter, once made a picture of the cows'-milk drinkers and the children at the Spring-gardens-gate; and he would have done well had he kept to such subjects, for his great scriptural pictures are so tame and insipid that they are scarcely worth house-room.
There is not a prettier sight in all London than this milk-fair, and the breath of the golden age seems to be wafted to us whenever we pass by it. We like to see the grave dappled cows submit sedately to the milkers, and the scent of the milk as it froths in the can recalls to our memory many pleasant passages of pastoral poetry. It is Corydon and Thyrsis and Lyce, Phyllis and Phœbe, who, in their neat gowns, barter for the nectar and prattle to the children ; and many an Amaryllis can be seen there under the shade, with some little rosy darling in a white quilted hat kissing and coaxing her for a cake or a sweetmeat. There is a rumour that the grand people in Carlton-terrace dislike the milkfair—are fretted by the chatter of the children, the lowing of the cows—and want to sweep out the whole affair; but we trust they will not succeed in this revolutionary and selfish measure. Jack-in-the-green is gone, Guy Faux is going, the oyster-shell grotto has become obsolete; we cannot spare another of the pleasant old London sights, especially when the sight is a daily, not merely an annual, one.
Hyde Park.
This delightful Park (originally 620 acres) formed in old times two manors, Neyte and Hyde, and belonged to the Monastery of St. Peter at Westminster, till Henry VIII., in 1536, laid his fat and greedy hand upon it, nominally giving a priory in Berkshire for the 620 good acres and the advowson of Chelsea. It was then fenced in and became a deer-park, and a keeper was appointed. Lysons describes it as a space lying between the Hounslow and Uxbridge roads.
It was the scene of many tragic duels, strange adventures, romantic incidents, and mysterious occurrences; on which it will be our duty and our pleasure to dilate in our next month's chapter.
1. Talking of blacks, George IV. had a silly dislike to negroes, and would never allow a sable musician in his private band. On one occasion Mr. J.R. Cramer, the leader, engaged as a kettledrummer a dark yellow man, who looked like a Creole. The King was angry, even when he found he was a bonâ-fide Englishman, and said to Cramer, "I see, sir, you are trying to break me in to a black drummer by degrees," There is not much in the story; but that is all there is of it.