Middlesex

The beauty, indeed, is mainly artificial, the ground being in general flat, traversed by sluggish streams, and often apt to revert to the con

ut under the fancy-dress of parks, gardens, pleasure-grounds and playgrounds, to be reckoned among the manufactures of a g

lage of Strand-on-the-Green, below Kew Bridge, only in part overlaid by an extension of suburban Gunnersbury. Then above Syon Park and Isleworth Church, at one mouth of the Cran

children that struggled on to any prospect of surviving her, the poor little Duke of Gloucester, was brought from Kensington to Twickenham, as to the seaside, for change of air after an illness. In the next century, Horace Walpole speaks of the place as the "Baiae of Great Britain," and quotes someone as declaring that "we have more coaches here than in half France." Among Pope's noble neighbours was the traveller of epistolary renown, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose friendship with the poet went so sour in the end. Some of the fine cedars hereabouts are said to have been raised from cones sent by her from the East. Another householder of rank was that Lord Ferrers, hanged for murder, according

es. But Marble Hill, built for the Countess of Suffolk, George II.'s mistress, and at one time the home of Mrs. Fitzherbert, another George's left-handed wife, has been saved from the

REET, T

hment, this mansion again gave refuge to the Orleans family; then for a time it was turned into a club. Members of the same family have more than once occupied the adjacent York House, whose earliest dignity was as home of Lord Clarendon, by him given to his son

ries, published in more than a dozen volumes. These volumes, abridged as they are, have been criticized as too voluminous; but they make excellent reading for judicious skippers, and after a century or two, one can imagine a further abridgment being treasured like Evelyn's Diary or Horace Walpole's Letters. This diarist was a keen amateur of good company and of good stories, which stud his pages like plums in a pudding of political suet and botanical crumbs. His anecdotes were collected

n this side of Jordan, whether it were out of courtesy or obliviousness that the old gentleman let himself appear to be amused. With one maiden anecdote, however, now for the first time blushing in print, I had been able to tickle him exceedingly, as it dealt with a colonial governor, a kind of personage bulking as largely in his interest as a schoolmaster did for Parson Adams. In the suite of such a temporary potentate served an officer, whose wife told me how at home, years later, makin

lf by no other title than "Elector of Middlesex," then was astonished to be received with honours due to a prince. Mr. Labouchere comes to mind here as for a time occupying Pope's Villa, of which the name survives, but little els

ng house," which its dilettante owner, on removing there from his "tub at Windsor," described as "the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges.... Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect; but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's when he set up in the ark with a pair of each kind.... Lord

surroundings, stands, in a transfor

FOUNTAIN,

riginally Whitton House, and not far off, on the south edge of Hounslow, survives the name of Whitton Park, where bagpipes should once have been practised; for, in the early part of the eighteenth century, it was a seat of the Duke of Argyll who in its grounds did so muc

1,000 acres, public access to which was secured by a local Hampden, Timothy Bennett, shoemaker, who in the eighteenth century fought the question of right of way at his own expense, then, in 1900, was rewarded by a curious memorial set up at one of the entrances to the park. The last royal personage who lived here was William IV., as Duke of Clarence; and one of the last acts of Queen Victoria was granting Bushey House to be a National Physical Laboratory. The park is now practically a public one, where a Sunday in May draws throngs of Londoners to admire

by presenting that too ambitious home to the King, who, in Diomedean exchange, gave him the manor of Richmond, where soon there were harder dealings between Ego and Rex meus. Henry pulled about the Cardinal's architecture in his own high-handed style, building the present hall and chapel; and he made Hampton a hunting-palace, with several parishes around as preserves. Edward VI. was born and partly brought up here. Here, too, Mary spent her dark honeymoon-that unloved sovereign whose faults have been excused by a schoolgirl on the plea of a temper soured under too many stepmothers. Hampton was a favourite residence with Elizabeth also, and with James, who held at

nna, whom thre

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tes of these dignified quarters are liable to be disturbed by the clatter of the adjacent barracks, by an uncertain ghost of one or other of Henry's wives, that does not fail to haunt here, and most of all, perhaps, by the sightseers, who on holidays throng the quiet courts, the galleries with

ell-shaded area as beseems its royal neighbourhood. Along this, or through the south-west corner of Bushey Park, one can pass on to the village of Hampton, which touches the river at its rebuilt Church; but the banks are much

RT PALACE:

o a home on Hampton Green, about which there remain several houses and gardens where wigs and ruffles would look hardly out of place. New Hampton, to the north, is more commonplace, where Hampton's railway-station, on the Shepperton branch, stands half an

on the bank to the station a mile behind, where another royal residence is believed to have stood in Kempton Park, now degraded into a race-course. Close to Sunbury is Upper Halliford, by which a road takes a straighter line into the neighbouring pa

hile traces and traditions of Roman camps on either side the river help out the case for Halliford. Non nostrum tantas, etc. An authentic claim to note for Lower Halliford is as the home of Thomas Love Peacock, an author too little known to the general reader, though his humorous novels were spread out over nearly half a century, from the days when he caricatured Shelley and Coleridge, through the period of Brougham's patronage of useful knowledge, to that when competitive examinations gave him a fresh target for ridicule. By an audience fit, though few, he is not forgotten; and for t

reful me

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o strangers are the riverside inns and boathouses. To the right of a road cutting across to Laleham by Shepperton Green lies the small parish of Littleton, making perhaps the prettiest spot in this district, with its ancient Church and timbered park, which once enclosed a ce

an a mile brings the cyclist from Shepperton to Chertsey Bridge. The green flats have a beauty of quiet amplitude, which is at least a change after Richmond's manifold prospects and the tangled groves of Hampton; and here a fine background is formed by the pine-bristled heights of Surrey, edging the arena in which the Wey meets the Thames. Willi

enowned Chertsey Abbey. The pretty village of Laleham, with its much-patched church, is notable as the home where Dr. Arnold took pupils in his early life.

life a li

d smiles

aid in one

alley lands. He could no longer rejoice in the bank up to Staines as a walk "which, though it be perfectly flat, has yet a great charm from its entire loneliness, there being not a house anywhere nea

g the neck of Penton Hook, a most childish vagary of a mile or so in which hoary Father Thames thinks fit to indulge himself so far on in his career. This loop, on the Surrey side, is buckled by an extraordinary gathering of bungalows, house-boats, tents, and shanties that give airy and water

that works its mills; but the floods of this sluggish delta have washed a later growth to the east, and it shows a new red church on the Thames bank, where a terrace of dignity looks across to the boathouses lining the Surrey side. A meaner quarter straggles on to the dull flats of Staines Moor behind the rail

me that young lion of the Daily Telegraph who, in criticizing my book on Surrey, growled at its mention of a notable Lord Mayor's progress nearly three generations ago as made to Staines, and not rather to Oxford. For once a critic is wrong: the goal of the official journey was Staines, the circumgression to Oxford being tacked on as an after-tho

ame his important charge, and the "four high-spirited and stately horses" which, "having been allowed a previous day of unbroken rest, ... chafed and champed exceedingly on the bits by which their impetuosity was restrained." But the murmurs of the admiring crowd were "at length hushed by the opening of the hall door"; then, "as soon as the female attendant of the Lady Mayoress had taken her seat, dressed with becoming neatness, at the side of the well-looking coachman, the carriage drove awa

angers being fêted, lionized and addressed by Town and Gown, and come to that great day, Thursday, July 27, 1826, when the City Barge, having taken nearly a week to make the upward voyage, lay in waiting by the banks of Christ Church meadow, with its ten splendid scarlet silk banners waving gently in the rising sun, beside the shallop of the Thames Navigation Committee and another large boat, in which came his lordship's Yeomen of the Household, together with that most important functionary th

ooming faces, were seen hurrying forth from their cottages and gardens, climbing trees, struggling through copses, and traversing thickets to make their shortest way to the water side." No wonder the children ran, for the Lord Mayor and Mr. Alderman Atkins scattered handfuls of half-pence from their stately craft. At Caversham the condescension of true gr

ls and the firing of guns, not to speak of a band of music now taken on board. They dined at Clieveden, which prompts the author to a homily on the shortcomings of Dryden's Buckingham, balanced by a seven-page eulogium on the virtues of the late George III. The local gentry and officials did not fail to pay their respects to the passing Admiral of the Thames, and were invited on board "with all the usu

Delayed till noon by sight-seeing, the procession then got afloat for Staines, and whereas, above Windsor, the state barge had almost stuck in the mud, it now made better way in deepe

robes and emblems of office, to the music of national airs, amid multitudes of the surrounding inhabitants, our City fathers descended to the shore, and three times s

Mayor, Lord Henry Beauclerk, a lad of very prepossessing appearance, of the age of fourteen, dressed in naval uniform, and brother to His Grace the Duke of St. Albans, mounted the Stone, and held the City Banner during the performance of the ceremony. The Lord Mayor now received a bottle of wine from one of the attendants, and broke it,

ght Hon

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day of Jul

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undred newly-coined sixpences, and after re

ilpins "returned to their respective homes." His lordship, it is recorded, reached the Mansion House "a few minutes before ten" on this Saturday night; but future ages are left to guess at what hour he went to bed. The worthy chaplain, long laid to deeper rest, woul

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