WAYSIDE NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 6473, 10 November 1882, Page 3

WAYSIDE NOTES.

(By a Special Correspondent.)

KINGSTON AND HAMPTON COURT

There are few cities in Europe surrounded by more .beautiful or easily-acceßsible places of resort for pleasure-seekers than London, and the poorest of its four million of inhabitants has it in-his power, occasionally at least, during the summer months to exchange the heat, and dußt, and dirt, and din of its multitudinous streets and crowded thoroughfares for the silence, the coolness, the freshness, and the seclusion .■ of parks and woods, of wild commons and primitive forests, of picturesque green lanes and lovely riverside nooks, which will refresh him with their verdure and delight him by their beauty. There are all the great railway companies competing for his patronage; there are steamboats plying up and down the river eagerly bidding against each other for tho privilege and profit of conveying him beyond the reach of smoke and fog. For sixpence, a shilling, or eighteen-pence he can have an outing which will send him back to his week's work reinyigorated in mind and body, and carrying with him into the dinginess and dissonance of his daily life hints and suggestions, glimpses and reminiscences of the sweetness and tranquility, the bloom and brightness, and tho perpetually-renovated youth of Nature. Something of the fragrance of the hayfield, or the perfume of blossoming wild -'flowers; something of the music of skylarks " lilting in the lift," of blackbirds piping in the hazel copse, of thrushes flutingin the " merry green wood" ; something of the murmur of the brook, the ripple of the woodland stream, and the plash and foam of the waters of the mill-weir; something of the lustre of the summer sky, and of the purity of the vagrant breeze that rustles among the foliage of the immemorial woods, or transforms the golden surface of the ripened cornfield into an image of the waving sea, will accompany him, after one of these Saturday or Sunday excamions, into his grimy workshop and his unlovely home. Within-a few miles of the huge city, whose enormity is becoming a marvel and a portent, lie large fragments of what may be called the-English bush. Eppmg 1-orest, Shirley and Hayes Commons, and the fern brakes itf Richmond Park are as full of unsophisticated wildness as they were in the days, of Plantagenet and Tudor, and even of Norman, Saxon, Dane, or Roman. Not only so, but the tourist meets with objects associated with remote epochs of English history, which serve to bring the past vividly before him, and to link him in some degree with the illustrious dead, or with those who have played an important part in fashioning the destinies of his country. There, for example, in that old-fashioned town of Kingston-upon-Thames, 13 miles from London, is the very stono, carefully preserved, upon which seven of the Saxon kings were solemnly enthroned at their coronation, and their names and the dates at which they acquired or succeeded to the crown are engraved upon the broad pedestal. This interesting monument, surrounded by an iron railing, stands in the centra of tho leading thoroughfare of the town, which has taken its name of Cyningeßtune Oinngestune, or Kingston from it: and the sunshine and storms of 10 centuries have beaten upon it without effect,

while the very dust of tho monarchs who took their seats upon its rugged surface in the midst of such pomp and splendour as were practicable in a semi - barbaric ago is now undistinguishable from that of the serfs and churls Who tilled the soil, and swelled.the crowd which saluted the new King with a burst of acclamation. Here, too, is the spot at which it is believed that Ciesar and his legions crossed the Thames; and here is the house, still standing on the south sido of the High street, in which King John was born; Here, also, did Sir Thomas Wyatt cross the river when he made his abortive effort to obtain possession of London in his disastrous rebellion ; and here occurred the skirmish botween the Royalists and Roundheads, in the year 1648, when the Earl of Holland, the Duke of Buckingham, and his brother, Lord SYancis Villiers, made a gallant but unsuccessful effort to retrieve the fallen fortunes of the Stuarts, and the last-named nobleman paid the forfeit of his life.

On tho otlier, or Middlesex, side o£ the Thames stands the sumptuous pile erected by Cardinal Wolsey—in the plenitude of his power and tho amplitude of his wealth—before he had made the mortifying discovery that he had ventured for many summers in a sea of glory far beyond his depth, and before_ his disastrous reverse of fortune had constrained him to exclaim— Ho.v wretched Is that poor man that hangs on princo3* favours! There is betwixt that ainiie wo would aspire to, That sweet assert of princes, and their rain, More pans* and fears than wars or womeu have; And when ha falls he falls like Lucifer— Never to hope a^ain. Hampton Court Palace, with its picturesque quadrangles, its gardens inlaid with a rich mosaic of carpet bedding, in which Nature is made to reverse tho usual practice and to mimic art, its venerable vine with 1300 clusters of the purple berry depending from its branches, its fountain, its fishpond, its three avenues radiating from the terrace; and Bushy Park, with its tawny glades and stately chestnut trees, are still two of the most charming places to be met with in the neighbourhood of London. Even 'Any cannot vulgarise them, nor Mary Haim detract from their power to please..- In the morning, more particularly, before the steamboat has brought down its first load of tourists or of holiday-makers, you may roam about the grounds and wander through the picture galleries with as much freedom and as little liability to interruption as if they were your own. The British taxpayer feels, indeed, that he has a proprietary interest in them; and although the private apartments are reserved as the residences of the widows of men who have distinguished themselves in the public service and have died poor, tho palace is, to all intents and purposes, maintained for the enjoyment of the people; tens of thousands of whom visit it during the summer months. On Sunday afternoons, more especially, the long suite of rooms containing the pictures attracts a concourse of visitors from London. There was a time when the

princelyhospitalityof thegreat Churchman who built the older portions of the palace was exhibited in providing 290 "silken beds" for the accommodation of his guests at Hampton Court; and later on, when Charle« the Second resided here, it was a centre of intrigue and gallantry; but to-day the latter epoch is only recalled to mind by the portraits of the Court beauties which grace its walls, and seem to look down upen the common-place people and common-place costumes of the present period with a disdainful, if not a derisive smile upon their handsome faces. There is the Countess of Clarendon, celebrated by Lansdowne and Swift; and the Duchess of Marlburnugh, upon whom Pope has conferred an unenviable immortality; and pretty Miss Scroop; and the Duchesses of Grafton, Manchester,- and St. Albans; and the Countesses of Dorset, Essex, and Eanelagh; and the counterfeit presentment of many a lovely woman besides, some of whom lived to "fall into the portion of weeds and outworn faces " ; while all went, ip course of time, to that " convocation of politic worms " concerning which Hamlet moralised so grimly when he told the King that " we fat all creatures else to fat us ; and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes,- but to one table. That's the end. A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the flesh that fed of that worm." If tho walls of these spacious apartments could speak, what scandalous stories they might report to us concerning some of the very beau ties whose fair faces beam upon us from the canvases of Lely or of Kneller ! How significant, for example, is the following entry in the diary of old «am Pepys, under date of the 31st of May, 1602 :—" The Queen is brought a few days since to Hampton Court, and all people say of her to be a very fine aud handsome lady, and very discreet, and that the King is pleased enough with her: which, I fear, will put Madam Caßtlemaine's nose out of joint." It was only ten days before that the garrulous old gossip reported the King as having dined and BUppud with the royal favourite "everyday and night the last week," and animadverted upon the fact that there was no bonfire kindled at her door in celebration of the Queen's arrival, although almost every other house in the street made a demonstration of this kind; but he added, " She (Lady Castlemaine) is now a most disconsolate oreature, and comes not out of doors since the King's going." However, she visited the theatre, and Pepys and his wife were there too, " and," he sayj, "with much pleasure we saw and gazed upon Lady Castlemaine, but it troubles us to soe her look dejectedly, and slighted by people already." Five years afterwards she fell in love with Harry Jermyn, afterwards Earl of Dover, and this causes Pepys to observe: "The King is mad at her entertaining Jermyn, and she is mad at Jermyn's going to marry from her; so they are all mad. And thus the kingdom is governed !" Verily, a mad world, my masters!" And never more so in England than when the rustle of silken doublets and satin skirts was heard in the chambers and corridore of Hampton Court Palace, and men and women had ns other occupation than gallantry, and a licentious dramatic literature fostered the depraved spirit of the a»e; and the evil example of royalty and tho dissolute lives of the nobility tended to the corruption of the middle classes, and the reaction against the austerity and fanaticism of the Puritans brought about such a general relaxation of public morals as threatened at one time to destroy the social fabric, which it had infected and contaminated from top to bottom.