rather say, next Piccadilly; for the metropolis,
alas! and Kensington, are now joined;
though from Kiiightsbridge to the Palace
the houses still occupy only one side of the
way.

It is a very pleasant way, especially if you
come through the Park. When we quit
Piccadilly for Hyde Park Corner, we, for our
parts, always fancy that the air, somehow,
feels not only fresher, but whiter; and this
feeling increases, as we find the turf under
our feet and the fresh air in one's face. The
road-way through Knightsbridge , with its
rows of houses on one side, and its barracks
on the other, is not so agreeable; though by
way of compensation, you have the chance of
having your eyes refreshed with a dignified
serjeant of dragoons, too fat for his sash,
and a tall private, walking with a little
woman.

The long, and again unoccupied side of the
road, in the Park, reaching from the Knightsbridge
Barracks to within a short distance of
the Gardens, lately presented to the eyes of
the world a spectacle singularly illustrative
of the advanced character of the age, and
such, we believe, as no attempts to bring
back a worse spirit in Europe will deprive of
its good effects, however threatening those
attempts may appear. When it was determined
that the structure in which the Great
Exhibition was held should re-appear in
another quarter, and this too with those
improvements in point of size and treatment
which the designer himself had longed for
power to effect, we felt glad to have the old
trees and (the hope of the old) turf back
again, undisturbed, and rejoiced in a result,
upon which, in fact, all parties were to be
congratulated. We began to own, that there
certainly had been a dust and a kick-up
about the once quiet approach to Kensington
— a turmoil of crowds, and omnibuses, and
cabs, of hot faces and loud voices, of stalls,
dogs, penny trumpets, policemen, and ex-tempore
public-houses — which for the sake
of the many themselves one could hardly
have wished to see continued, lest they also
should ultimately have missed their portion
in the tranquil pleasures of the few. Multitudes
became somewhat too multitudinous.
European brotherhood itself, now and then,
felt its toes trodden upon a little too sharply.
The most generous emulations, if they want
elbow-room, are in danger of relapsing into
antagonisms. A juvenile wit in the shape of
a pot-boy, who appears to have possessed a
profound natural insight into this tendency of
the meeting of extremes, cried out one day
to a couple of foreigners who were showing
symptoms of a set-to, " Go it, All Nations!"

The road from Knightsbridge to
Kensington, which the Great Exhibition looked
on, is called the Gore—a word, which, with
the surveyor as well as the sempstress,
appears to mean a slip or graft of something
in addition, and of the shape of a blunted
cone; though the elegance to which the spot
has attained must not let us forget, that the
same word has been employed in the sense
of mud and dirt, and that the road in this
quarter used to be in very bad condition.
Lord Hervey, writing towards the middle
of the last century, describes it as shocking.
And the royal roads through the Park were
little better.

"The removing from Kensington to Saint
James's for the purpose of facilitating the
Queen's intercourse with Ministers, seems
in our days" (observes the editor of his
Lordship's Memoirs) "very singular; but
the following extract from a letter to his
mother, dated twenty-seventh of November,
seventeen hundred and thirty-six, will
explain it:—

"' The road between this place (Kensington)
and London is grown so infamously bad,
that we live here in the same solitude as we
should do if cast on a rock in the middle of
the ocean; and all the Londones tell us
there is between them and us a great impassable
gulf of mud. There are two roads
through the park; but the new one is so
convex, and the old one so concave, that by
this extreme of faults they agree in the
common one of being, like the high road,
impassable.' " Vol II., p. 189.

Kensington Gore commences opposite
Prince's Gate with the mansion called Ennismore,
or Listowel House, formerly Kingston
House. It is now the residence of the
nobleman who possesses those two first
titles; was lately that of the Marquis
Wellesley; and was built by the once
notorious Duchess of Kingston, famous in the
annals of bigamy.

The Duchess of Kingston — the Miss
Chudleigh of whom we have had a glimpse by
anticipation in Kensington Gardens — was an
adventuress, who, after playing tricks with a
parish register for the purpose of alternately
falsifying and substantiating a real marriage,
according as the prospects of her husband
varied, imposed herself on a duke for a
spinster, and survived him as his duchess
till unmasked by a court of law. She was a
well-born and handsome, but coarse-minded
woman, qualified to impose on none but very
young or very shallow admirers. Her first
husband, who became Earl of Bristol, was at
the time of his marriage a young seaman,
just out of his teens; and the duke, her
second husband, though he was nephew of
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, appears never
to have outgrown the teens of his
understanding. Hating prolixity and mock-
modesty, her ladyship's maxim, we are told,
was to be " short, clear, and surprising; " so
she concentrated her rhetoric into swearing,
and dressed in a style next to not dressing at
all. The wealth, however, which was
bequeathed her by the duke, enabled her, in spite
of the loss of his title in England, to go and
flare as a duchess abroad, where her jewels