WE come now to the south-western corner of Middlesex, presenting a thick fringe of beauty and interest along the crooked course of the Thames. The beauty, indeed, is mainly artificial, the ground being in general flat, traversed by sluggish streams, and often apt to revert to the condition of a flooded marsh till banked in by dykes of habitation and ornamentation that make most of this river-edge one line of garden suburb. When we abuse London for defiling the country, let us not forget how plain-featured country may be disguised and pranked out under the fancy-dress of parks, gardens, pleasure-grounds and playgrounds, to be reckoned among the manufactures of a great city. Here, indeed, a champaign face of nature smiles rather for Pope and Bolingbroke than for Wordsworth and Tennyson.

We have already touched the Thames at Brentford, and since inner London ended with Hammersmith, something might have been said of the green tongue of Chiswick and the quaint village 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 Crane, the villas of St. Margaret’s make a transpontine dependency of Richmond, almost joined also to the spread of Twickenham. At this latter town I take up my tale of the riverside.

Twickenham has been growing so fast along its tram-lines that it seems in danger of becoming a commonplace extension of London; but it cannot forget days of dignity when Queens, Princes, and poets were at home here. Katherine of Aragon, Katherine Parr, and Katherine of Braganza are supposed to have occupied the manor-house that once stood beside the Church, where lie buried Pope, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Kitty Clive the actress, and Admiral Byron, that “Foul-weather Jack” whose story of the Wager’s wreck gave so many hints to his grandson’s verse. Queen Anne, whose death is such a well-authenticated fact in history, was born at Twickenham, as was her sister Queen Mary. The only one of Anne’s seventeen 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 to the legend, in a silk rope, driven to the gallows in his own coach and six, which nowadays would probably have taken the road to Broadmoor Asylum. Writers whose works are now in every gentleman’s library, but not in Mudie’s, such as Richard Owen Cambridge, who seemed to his contemporaries a universal genius, and that other poet whose fortune was to be “born a Whitehead and baptized a Paul,” could once be counted among the notabilities of a place which, under the shadow of Pope’s renown, has housed more enduring names, from Fielding to Dickens. But for the long list of its celebrities and associations, the reader must be referred to such local chronicles as R. S. Cobbett’s Memorials of Twickenham.

Some of the houses thus celebrated still stand, or their names at least are preserved. Twickenham Park, at the Richmond Bridge end, a seat of Lord Bacon, has given place to humbler homes. 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 jerry-builder to become a public pleasure-ground, that will not debase the view from Richmond Hill. This house is haunted by the shades of Pope, Swift, and Gay, as its neighbour by more

recent memories of princely exiles. Orleans House was so renamed as making an asylum for Louis Philippe, escaped from the storm of the Revolution which Madame de Genlis had taught him to hail with youthful enthusiasm. Half a century later, after his second banishment, 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-in-law, James II.; and so it came to be the birthplace of two English Queens. It has now been bought from the Duke of Orleans by a Parsee gentleman, son of the late Mr. Tata of Bombay, that millionaire of princely public spirit who lies buried in the next county.

This connection with our Eastern Empire is not altogether a new one for York House. A visitor here in his day was the Brahmin reformer Rammohun Roy, founder of the Brahmo-Somaj church, who is said to have designed writing a philosophical dialogue with the scene laid on the terrace of York House. For a good many years towards the end of the century it was occupied by Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff, ex-Governor of Madras, as will be remembered by all readers of the later extracts from his Diaries, 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 from all quarters, even from the steps of the throne. There is one, for instance, of a South African millionaire, whose accent led to him being addressed in German by a very eminent personage: “Sind Sie Baier?” “Not at present prices, your Majesty!” stammered the confused courtier. In the same volume we are told how a whist player held thirteen trumps, yet did not win a trick, for it was in the far West, and his partner shot him dead as remonstrance against the trumping of his own ace.

But one must not deck one’s pages with plumes borrowed from a writer whom I met as fellow-member of two among his many clubs. I can recall a wet afternoon we killed together shortly before his death, when, to cheer what seemed a fit of depression, I told him all the stories I could think of as likely to stir his sense of humour. Only afterwards did it occur to me, in a flash of esprit d’escalier, that I had been drawing on one of his own lately published volumes; and I shall never know, on 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, making a third-class railway journey, they had brought considerations to bear upon the guard that they should have the compartment to themselves. But at one station he came to explain: “Very sorry—train crowded—must put someone in with you—but I have picked out a respectable couple—quite decent people; you won’t mind them”—with which apology were bundled in the very decent couple my friends had last seen viceregally enthroned in a distant clime. So much for the transitoriness of official glory!

A tale which Grant-Duff might not have thought worth recording has been told of Mr. Labouchere, but an older date is ascribed to it: that an Englishman travelling in Germany, called upon to declare his Stand, could describe himself 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 else, among the riverside mansions at the further end of Twickenham. It stands above Eel-pie Island, a leafy atoll of the Thames, that makes a screen or barrier-reef for this town, and has at its lower end a ferry not unknown to song.

Pope’s nearest neighbour here was Lord Radnor, whose grounds are now turned to public enjoyment. A little further on stands back from the river the park of Strawberry Hill, where Horace Walpole’s “piecrust battlements” succeeded Pope’s Villa as lion of the place. The once famous collection of curiosities, after being dispersed, was in part regathered into the present mansion, enlarged and improved from that “Strawberry Hill Gothic” structure that became a proverb, not to say a by-word, with more tasteful architects. The nucleus of it was “a little plaything 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 John Sackville pre-deceased me here, and instituted certain games called cricketalia, which have been celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow.” Still, of a summer evening, such mysteries are celebrated on the lordly expanse of Twickenham Green; but if this self-satisfied letter-writer’s ghost could come skimming under what were once his own windows, Father Noah might find it no harder to be at home in a toyshop ark than Walpole to recognize the “romance in lath and plaster” that was his much-advertised work of half a century.

Behind Twickenham, amid more rural surroundings, stands, in a transformed state, the mansion of Sir Godfrey

Kneller the painter, which came to be a training-school for teachers, with the late Archbishop Temple for one of its principals, but is now the home of another muse as an academy for army bandsmen, whose performances are open to the public once a week. Kneller Hall was originally 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 much towards introducing alien trees, to become naturalized citizens of our groves and gardens. This was the Duke who served with distinction under Marlborough and as victor over the Old Pretender’s forces in 1715; while he may be best remembered as patron of “Jeanie Deans.”

In the famous view beheld by that heroine from Richmond Hill, Twickenham is seen imperceptibly merging into Teddington, a parish of less fame, but it, too, has had notable inhabitants, from William Penn the Quaker to Peg Woffington the actress; and R. D. Blackmore, the novelist of our own time, practised the moral of Candide in a market-garden here. Both Upper and Lower Teddington are well populated now, the latter best known to Londoners for the first full lock on Thames tide-water, the former as an approach to Bushey Park. This is a royal demesne of over 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 the flowering of the chestnuts on its renowned avenue. But “when the high midsummer pomps are on,” too, and in the glories of autumn decay, and, indeed, at all seasons, Bushey, with its fine timber, its stretches of bracken, its ponds, and its herds of tame deer, makes a sight that no visitor to London should miss. The main avenue, a straight and broad mile, leads from Teddington to Hampton Court, on the other side approached from Kingston Bridge through the glades of Hampton Park, to which one could come round by the river and the villas of Hampton Wick.

The history of this palace is, of course, familiar to every British schoolboy; but in case any of my readers should be more at home in Versailles or the Vatican, I will treat them as M. Jourdain desired of his master. Hampton Court was built by Cardinal Wolsey at the height of his power and pride, that would have cast into shade the magnificence of Canons Park, the household of the butcher’s son being nearly ten times as numerous as that of Queen Anne’s Paymaster-General. Extensive as his building was, Wolsey appears not to have completed its full design when his power became endangered by the conflagration lit at Anne Boleyn’s eyes. He hoped to avert Henry’s wrath 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 it his famous conference of divines, from which came our present translation of the Bible. Charles I. was much at home at Hampton, and so in turn was Cromwell—a fact which may have caused the mental confusion of that schoolboy quotation of him as exclaiming, “Had I but served my God as I have served my King!” Charles II. and his brother are found now and then at Hampton, to which William took a special fancy, so that he had it restored and enlarged by Wren, to be a home reminding him of Holland by its canals and gardens; and he met his fatal fall from horseback in the park. Queen Anne’s sickly son, above mentioned, was born at the palace, where the poet remarks how—

The Georges seem rather to have neglected Hampton Court, which in the last century or so occasionally housed royal guests, but has become mainly a sort of aristocratic almshouse, the apartments being granted to widows of distinguished public servants or ladies better born than endowed. The inmates 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 their thousand pictures, the hall with its tapestries, the gardens with their gigantic vine, the Long Walk by the river, the banks of the Long Water in Hampton Park, and the Maze near the Lion Gate, outside of which the palace is separated from Bushey Park by a fair-ground of refreshment houses.

The station for Hampton Court is at Molesey, on the Surrey side of the river, here making a string of shady islets and creeks well known to boating parties. The tramways from London come to Hampton Green, such a spacious and well-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 blocked by private residences, and soon disfigured by huge water reservoirs. The most famous house here is Garrick’s villa, that seems to have been designed as an understudy of Pope’s. Besides this noble retreat, Garrick had a

town-house at the Adelphi, and was lord of Hendon Manor; few actors have managed to be so prudent, so prosperous, and so well off for “the things that make death terrible,” as was Johnson’s comment on his old pupil’s display. Sir Christopher Wren retired to 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 hour’s walk from the palace. About as far to the north of this line is Hanworth, traversed by the artificial Queen’s or Cardinal’s River formerly mentioned, and once distinguished by a Tudor hunting-lodge which became the home of Henry VIII.‘s lucky widow.

By its Thames Street, Hampton straggles on towards Sunbury, where the river is broken by eyots, weirs, and a deep shady cut on the Surrey side. This village, too, contains good old-fashioned houses as well as new ones, stretching back from its Church 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 parish of Shepperton, cutting across a bend of the river opposite Walton-on-Thames. Shepperton is a more scattered place, containing several hamlets and strings of villas connected by roads that seldom want the true Middlesex wealth of hedgerow timber.

Here at last we seem to be getting into open country, and away from riverside villas. A summer encampment at the end of Walton Bridge left out of account, the next place reached on the river is the pretty group of houses and inns called Lower Halliford, a little above the bridge. This ford makes the scene of a hot antiquarian controversy as to whether or no CÆsar here crossed the Thames, fortified against him by the Cowey Stakes, which some take rather for an ancient fishing weir; and his point of crossing is variously maintained to have been at Brentford, Kingston, and Wallingford, while 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 the sake of his wit he may be forgiven such thoughtless gibes as that “Scotchmen would be the best people in the world if there was nobody but themselves to give them characters.” There is reason to believe, indeed, that even before his deathbed this audacious writer repented the profanity with which he bespattered our modern Athens. The plan, at least, of Peacock’s books was revived for our generation in Mr. Mallock’s New Republic; but Peacock strikes a note of more farcical fun, and his satire seems seldom less jovial than the song put into the mouth of a character in Crotchet Castle:

Higher up on the bank comes the church core of Shepperton; then Shepperton Lock is higher still, opposite the Thames end of Weybridge. The village seems to have shifted its centre of gravity towards the station and Shepperton Green, which stand further back, but best known to 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 celebrated mansion destroyed by fire. This backwater of woodland, shading surely the tiniest of Britain’s Exe or Esk streams, is pleasantly reached by a field-path from the end of Chertsey Bridge; then the road by Littleton goes on to less taking scenes about Feltham or Ashford.

At Shepperton Lock the tow-path crosses from the Surrey side, and henceforth one can walk along the Middlesex bank, access to which has hitherto been precarious. Truth to tell, one thus gains little beyond a prospect of the stream flowing quietly between broad meadows, its bends making an idle round off the straight road, by which little more than 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. William Black’s rhapsodical pen can make no more of this scenery than “a peaceful landscape, very English-looking; in the distance there was a low line of wooded hill, with here and there a church spire appearing among the trees.” A thunderstorm would get a good stage here, as did Mr. Wells’s Martian giants when they came stalking across from Byfleet.

Beyond Chertsey Bridge the tow-path is joined by a road that leads on along the wall of Lord Lucan’s Park to Laleham Ferry, opposite the site of that once renowned 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. Matthew Arnold was born here, and is buried, beside other members of the family, in the churchyard to which his heart and his father’s always turned fondly.

The Rugby head master had to wrench himself away from Laleham, where, indeed, his special admiration was called forth on the Surrey side by the striking contrast of heath scenery mingling with rich valley 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 near it; and the river here has none of that stir of boats and barges upon it which makes it in many places as public as the highroad.” Nowadays one must search far up the Thames for an unstirred reach.

Arnold’s roomy house has vanished, and the quiet amenities of Laleham seem threatened by architecture of another school, though it stands a good two miles from either Shepperton or Staines station. But the builder is hardly needed to populate the river banks in summer, as we see after crossing 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 watery shelter to an encampment of respectable gipsies from London, a sort of amphibious picnic life come into favour in late years. Past this, the tow-path brings us round to the more permanent riverside quarters of Staines, reached, as usual, less deviously and pleasantly by a flat, straight road.

Staines is one of the oldest towns in Middlesex, here or hereabouts appearing to have stood the Roman station Ad Pontes, by which the road to Silchester and Bath crossed the river. The whole vicinity has been found rich in Roman remains. The original town lies about its parish church in the valley of the Colne, 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 railway, from which High Street curves spaciously down to the bridge, for long the nearest neighbour of London Bridge. In our great-grandfathers’ day Staines Bridge was crossed by some three dozen coaches daily; and who can count the myriad wheels that now make this short straight cut through Middlesex into Surrey!

Near its bridge stands what is taken for the town’s godfather, London Stone, marking from times immemorial the limit of the City’s jurisdiction up the Thames, as ascertained and asserted by repeated visits of the Lord Mayor and Corporation, which seem now to have fallen into abeyance. Here I would call up the spirit of Matthew Arnold to rebuke for 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-thought, or piece of by-play. Even thus let me conclude this chapter with an excursus further up the river, to justify my accuracy by giving a faithful account of that Thames Anabasis that might have been forgotten but for the reverend Xenophon—his Lordship’s chaplain, to wit—who enshrined the record in a leaden volume, now worth its weight in silver.

The civic fathers, we are told, having resolved to assert the City’s prerogative at Staines, were tempted by an invitation to connect with that time-honoured ceremony a pleasure-trip to Oxford. To Oxford, then, the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress travelled by land, and the first part of the chronicle is taken up in describing most minutely the circumstances of this extra jaunt. A whole page goes to the start, including a description of the coachman’s countenance, “reserved and thoughtful” as became 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 away—not, however, with that violent and extreme rapidity which rather astounds than gratifies the beholders, but at that steady and majestic pace which is always an indication of real greatness.” The chaplain, our author, was of the party, though he modestly keeps himself in a back seat. Thus he can assure us that the roads were “in excellent order, and that the whole face of creation gleamed with joy.” It is not every day that creation sees an actual Lord Mayor faring forth over Middlesex roads.

At Hounslow a powder-mill happened to blow up, as if to salute the passage of the City potentate; but without further excitement he reached Oxford, joined there by several Aldermen and officials, who were forthwith entertained by the local municipality, while “it must here be mentioned that the Lady Mayoress and other ladies of the party, to the number of eight, ordered dinner at the ‘Star,’ and spent the evening in their own society.” But let us pass over a long account of the illustrious strangers 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 the cook, “who was at the time of embarkation busily engaged in preparing a fire in a grate fixed in the bow of the boat.” So at last, “amidst shouts of reiterated applause from the surrounding multitudes, the City Barge, manned by the City watermen in scarlet liveries, and all the other boats in attendance on his lordship, were simultaneously launched on the broad bosom of the princely Thames”—a sight not to be seen by this degenerate age unless on the front page of its Illustrated London News.

Punch was not such a rare show in the country as a live Lord Mayor. Crowds of people on the tow-path escorted the procession from Oxford; then every town and village near the banks furnished a new contingent of eager spectators. “Distant shouts of acclamation perpetually re-echoed from field to field, as the various rustic parties, with their fresh and blooming 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 greatness was still more markedly exhibited in a moving incident recorded with long-drawn waggery, the gist of it being the picking out of a most uncouth and ludicrous-looking rustic mounted upon a “gaunt and rusty pony,” whom, flinging him a piece of money, his Lordship overwhelmed with the honour of a commission to ride on to Reading as his avant-courier.

Having started from Oxford at seven, the convoy reached Reading when “the sun had whirled down his broad disk into the west; and the evening twilight just served to show obscurely the tranquil stream of water over which the vessel glided, and the shapeless forms of country by which it was surrounded.” Here the voyagers spent the night at the “Bear Inn,” re-embarking next morning amid the ringing of bells 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 usual forms of politeness.” As we have seen, the distinguished tourists occasionally indulged themselves in mild jocosity; but on the whole their mood was one of becoming admiration, and their chaplain can assure us that “no recourse was had in any single instance throughout the voyage either to cards or dice, or to any other of those frivolous expedients to which the evening hours of life are sacrificed.”

The next night was spent at Windsor, where some score of pages go to celebrate the Castle apartments in a true “God bless the Regent and the Duke of York!” spirit of British loyalty. 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 deeper water, and “left a long, undulating track behind” as it passed beneath that royal abode, “lifting up its lordly pile as if to receive the prostrate homage of the surrounding country.”

Hitherto the voyage had been more of a pleasure jaunt, but at Staines came to be enacted the real business of this Lord Mayor’s show in partibus. Duly arrayed in their 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 solemnly circumambulated their western landmark—let us trust in true course of the sun, though on that pagan feature of the rite its reverend chronicler is not explicit.

We need not be surprised to hear that “at three o’clock the party sat down in the cabin of the State Barge to a cold collation; after which some speeches were made.” By half-past eight they landed at Richmond, where the carriages were in waiting, and the sunburned Gilpins “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, would surely turn in his grave could he know how he had taken pains to put in a ludicrous light that truly august Corporation, worshipful up and down the river for a hundred miles, though its practical power be now in the farther-reaching hands of the Thames Conservancy.