this was given up. Thus the Abbey of St.
Denis was despoiled of its most ancient
relics.

ECHOES.

Still the angel stars are shining,
Still the rippling waters flow,
But the angel-voice is silent
That I heard here long ago.
Hark! the echoes murmur low
Long ago!

Still the wood is dim and lonely,
Still the plashing fountains play,
But the past and all its beauty,
Whither has it fled away?
Hark! the mournful echoes say
Fled away!

Still the bird of night complaineth
(Now, indeed, her song is pain),
Visions of my happy hours,
Do I call and call in vain?
Hark! the echoes cry again
All in vain!

Cease, oh echoes, mournful echoes!
Once I loved your voices well;
Now my heart is sick and weary,
Days of old, a long farewell!
Hark! the echoes sad and dreary
Cry Farewell, farewell!

KENSINGTON.

From Gore House to the town of
Kensington we pass houses both old and new, some
in rows, and some by themselves enclosed in
gardens. They are all more or less good;
and the turnings out of them lead into a
considerable district which has lately been
converted from nursery and garden ground
into more streets, and is called Kensington
New Town. It is all very clean and neat,
and astonishes visitors, who, a few years ago,
beheld scarcely a house on the spot. A pleasant
hedge lane, paved in the middle, and
looking towards the wooded grounds of
Gloucester Lodge, where Canning lived, leads out
of it into Old Brompton. One street, which
has no thoroughfare, is quite of a stately
character though defaced at the corner with
one of those unmeaning rounded towers,
whose tops look like spice-boxes, or trifles
from Margate. The smaller streets also
partake of those improvements, both external
and internal, which have succeeded to the
unambitious barrack-like streets of a former
generation; nor, in acquiring solidity, have
they, for the most part, been rendered heavy
and dumpy—the too common fault of new
buildings in the suburbs. It is ridiculous to
see lumpish stone balconies constructed for
the exhibition of a few flower-pots; and
doors and flights of steps big enough for
houses of three stories, put to "cottages" of
one. Sometimes, in these dwarf suburban
grandiosities the steps look as weighty as
half the building: sometimes the door alone
reaches from the ground to the storey above
it, so that "cottages" look as if they were
inhabited by giants, and the doorways as if
they had been maximized, on purpose to
enable them to go in.

This Kensington New Town lies chiefly
between the Gloucester and Victoria roads.
Returning out of the latter into the high
road, we pass the remainder of the buildings
above noticed, and just before entering
Kensington itself, halt at an old mansion
remarkable for its shallowness compared
with its width, and attracting the attention
by the fresh look of its red and polluted
brick-work. It is called Kensington House,
and surpasses Gore House in the varieties of
its history; for it has been, first, the habitation
of a king's mistress; then a school kept
by an honest pedant whom Johnson visited;
then a French emigrant school which had
noblemen among its teachers, and in which
the late Mr. Shiel was brought up; then
a Roman Catholic boarding-house with
Mrs. Inchbald for an inmate; and now it is
an "asylum"— a term into which that
consideration for the feelings which so honourably
marks the progress of the present day has
converted the plain-spoken "mad-house" of
our ancestors.

The king's mistress was the once famous
Duchess of Portsmouth, a Frenchwoman—
Louise de Querouaille—who first came to
England in the train of Henrietta, Duchess
of Orleans, the sister of Charles the Second.
She returned and remained for the express
purpose (it is said) of completing the
impression she had made on him, and assisting
the designs of Louis the Fourteenth and the
Jesuits in making him a papist, and reducing
him to the treasonable condition of a
pensioner on the French court. Traitor and
pensioner, at all events, he became, and the
French young lady became an English
Duchess; but whether she was a party to the
plot, or simply its unconscious instrument,
she has hardly had justice done her, we think,
by the historians. She appears to have been
a somewhat silly person (Evelyn says she had
a "baby face"); she was bred in France at
a time when it was a kind of sacred fashion
to admire the mistresses of Louis the
Fourteenth, and think them privileged
concubines; she had probably learnt in the
convent where she was brought up that
lawless things might become lawful to serve
religious ends; and she was visited during
her elevation by her own parents—straight-
forward, unaffected people, according to
Evelyn; the father a "good fellow," who
seems at once to have rejoiced in her position
and yet to have sought no advantages from
it. The Duchess, to be sure, ultimately got as
much for herself as she could out of the
king. She was as lavish as he was; became
poor, a gambler, and a gourmande; and as
her occupation of the house at Kcnsington