artificial mound had previously been levelled. A new bridge has been thrown across the Serpentine, and more ornamental buildings been erected on its bank to serve for a powder-magazine and the house of the Humane Society, (beautiful antithesis!) and infantry barracks have been erected within the precincts of the park near Knightsbridge.

Kensington Gardens now occupy the Gravel-pit division and the larger portions of the Kensington and Middle divisions of the time of Oliver Cromwell. Farther along the Serpentine, and below the waterless waterfall, at its termination, the appearance of the park has been wonderfully changed since the time of the Protectorate. The remainder is characterised, perhaps, by a more careful surface-dressing, but in other respects it has, if anything, retrograded in internal ornament. Of the Ring, once the seat of gaiety and splendour, we may say with Wordsworth, that

it seems

"Dying insensibly away

From human thoughts and purposes,"

"To yield to some transforming power,
And blend with the surrounding trees."

We sometimes feel tempted to regret its decay, and also the throwing down of part of the south wall of the gardens, which seems to have let in too much sunlight upon them (to say nothing of east winds), and spoiled their umbrageous character. On the whole, however, the recent changes in Hyde Park are more striking in regard to its immediate vicinity, to the setting of the jewel as it were, than to the ground itself. Any one who enters the park from Grosvenor Gate (opened in 1724) and advances to the site of the Ring, will at once feel this change in its full force. Hemmed in though the 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 at 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 pow

dered 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, were 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 eyes in his early rambles

"Some time walking not unseen

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 furrowed land;
And the milk-maid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale."

And one of the poet's earlier compositions had afforded a strong suspicion of his idolatrous tendencies

"Now the bright morning-star, day's harbinger,

Comes dancing from the east, and brings with her
The flowery May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose.
Hail! beauteous May, that doth inspire
Mirth, and youth, and warm desire;
Meads and groves are of thy dressing,
Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing.
Thus we salute thee with our early song,
And welcome thee, and wish thee long."

To all which circumstances may be added that the said John Milton is affirmed (perhaps with a view to be near the scene of his official duties) to have resided for some time in a house on the south side of St. James's Park, at no immeasurable distance from the place where the enormities of May worship were perpetrated in 1654, under the very noses of a puritanical government.

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, harmonizing 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:-" Hyde Park, May 1st, 1654. This day there was a hurling of a great ball by fifty Cornish gentlemen of the 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 mentions in May 1658, "I went to see a coach-race in Hide

Park, and collationed in Spring Gardens." Pepys mentions in August, 1660:— "To Hide Parke by coach, and saw a fine foot-race three times round the park (Qu. Ring?) between an Irishman and Crow that was once my Lord Claypole's footman." Evelyn's coach-race (by which we must not understand such a race as might take place now-a-days between two professional or amateur coach-drivers, but more probably some imaginative emulation of classical chariot-races, for such was the tone of that age) recalls an accident which happened to Cromwell in Hyde Park in 1654. We learn from the Weekly Post,'-"His Highness the Lord Protector went lately in his coach from Whitehall to take the ayr in Hide Park; and the horses being exceedingly affrighted, set a running, insomuch that the postilion fell, whereby his Highness was in some danger; but (blessed be God) he was little hurt." Ludlow's version of this story is :-"The Duke of Holstein made him (Cromwell) a present of a set of grey Friesland coach-horses; 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." There may be some truth in this, although Ludlow was a small man, virulent in his vindictiveness, and a gobemouche; for the cautious journalist admits that the Protector was hurt; and Bates, Cromwell's physician, mentions that, from an idea that violent motion was calculated to alleviate some disorders to which he was subject, it was his custom when taking the air in his coach to seat himself on the driving-box, in order to procure a rougher shake. Cromwell-since we have got him in hand we may as well despatch him at once-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 Hide 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;" "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, as we have seen, it became private property. Evelyn (11th April, 1653) complains feelingly of the change:-" I went to take the aire in Hide Park, where every coach was made to pay a shilling, and horse sixpence, by the sordid fellow (poor Anthony Deane, of St. Martin's in the Fields, Esq.) who had purchased it of the state, as they are called." The courtly Evelyn had no words of reprobation for Mr. Hamilton, the ranger appointed at the Restoration, who continued for ten good years to let the park in farms; it not having been enclosed with a wall and re-stocked with deer till 1670.

Hyde Park has from an early period down to our own times been a favourite locality for reviews. "Mercurius Publicus" announced to the public on the 26th of April, 1660, that the Commissioners of the Militia of London were to "rendezvous their regiments of trained bands and auxiliaries" at Hyde Park; that Major Cox, "Quartermaster-general of the City," had been to view the ground; and that the Lord Mayor intended to appear at the review "with his collar of esses," and all the Aldermen "in scarlet robes, attended with the mace and cap of maintenance, as is usual at great solemnities." An Exact Account' of the pageant, published not long after, informs us that in Hyde Park "was erected a spacious fabric, in which the Lord Mayor in his collar of SS, and the Aldermen in their scarlet gowns, with many persons of quality, sate, by which the respective regiments in a complete order marched, giving many volleys of shot as they passed by;" that "in the White regiment of Auxiliaries in the first rank Major-General Mysse trailed a pike, who was followed with a numerous company of people with great acclamations;" that "the like hath hardly been seen, it being conceived that there could hardly be lesse than twenty thousand men in arms, besides the Yellow regiment which came out of Southwark, and also that complete regiment of horse commanded by Major-General Brown, where was likewise present so great a multitude of people, that few persons hath seen the like;" that "they marched out of the field in the same handsome manner, to the great honour and repute of the City of London, and satisfaction and content of all spectators;" and lastly, "which is observable, that in the height of this show the Lord Mayor received notice that Colonel John Lambert was carried by the park a prisoner unto Whitehall." Evelyn records a more courtly spectacle of the kind that took place on the same ground in July 1664:-"I saw his Majesty's Guards, being of horse and foote 4000, led by the General the Duke of Albemarle in extraordinary equipage and gallantry, consisting of gentlemen of quality and veteran souldiers, excellently clad, marched, and ordered, drawn up in battalia before their Maties in Hide Park, where the old Earle of Cleveland trailed a pike, and led the right-hand file commanded by the Viscount Wentworth his son, a worthy spectacle and example, being both of them old and valiant souldiers. This was to show ye French ambassador, Monsieur Comminges; there being a great assembly of coaches, &c., in the park." The prejudices of education might predispose one to imagine that the titled heroes celebrated by Evelyn" trailed the puissant pike" more gallantly than Major-General Mysse; but the observations of Pepys, who slipped into the park to see the review described by Evelyn, after cherishing his little body at an ordinary, induce us to suspend our judgment:--" From the King's Head ordinary with Creed to hire a coach to carry us to Hide Park, to-day there being a general muster of the king's guards, horse and foot; but they demand so high, that I

spying Mr. Cutler the merchant did take notice of him, and he going into his coach and telling me he was going to the muster, I asked and went along with him; when a goodly sight to see so many fine horses and officers, and the King, Duke, and others-came by a-horseback, and the two Queenes in the Queen-mother's coach (my lady Castlemaine not being there). And after long being there I light, and walked to the place where the King, Duke, &c., did stand, to see 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; which indeed was very good, though not without a slip now and then; and one broadside close to our coach as we had going out of the parke, even to the nearnesse to be ready to burn our hairs. Yet methought all these gay men are not the soldiers that must do the king's business, it being such as these that lost the old king all he had, and were beat by the most ordinary fellows that could be." Horace Walpole's account of a somewhat similar scene, 1759, may serve as a pendant to these remarks:- "I should weary you with what every body wearies me-the militia. The crowds in Hyde Park when the King reviewed them were inimaginable. My Lord Orford, their colonel, I hear looked ferociously martial and genteel, and I believe it; his person and air have a noble wildness in them; the regimentals too are very becoming, scarlet faced with black, buff waistcoat and gold buttons. How knights of the shire, who have never shot anything but woodcocks, like this warfare I don't know; but the towns through which they pass adore them, everywhere they are treated and regaled." 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, when a Lilliputian British frigate blew a Lilliputian American frigate out of the water, in commemoration of-the founders of the feast confessed themselves at a loss to say what.

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 here Cromwell reviewed his terrible Ironsides. And though Butler's

muse, which, as the bee finds honey in every flower, elaborates the ludicrous from all events, has sneered at the labours of the citizens of London who threw up the fort in Hyde Park, the jest at which royalists could laugh under Charles II. was no joke to the Cavaliers of Charles I. The very women shared the enthusiasm, and, as the irreverend bard alluded to sings

"March'd rank and file with drum and ensign,
T'entrench the city for defence in ;

Raisep rampions with their own soft hands,

And put the enemy to stands.

From ladies down to oyster wenches,

Labour'd like pioneers in trenches,

Fall'n to their pick-axes and tools,

And help'd the men to dig like moles."

One circumstance that tends to impress us with the idea of the solitary character of Hyde Park and its environs when compared with St. James's Park