A Fountain in St. James's Park.
East of St. James's Park are the stately Government Offices, and south is Birdcage Walk, overlooked by the pretty hanging gardens and balconies that adorn the mansions of picturesque Queen Anne's Gate. Where "Spring Gardens" now stand was, in old days, "Milk Fair," where asses' and cows' milk was sold to the votaries of fashion, to repair the ravages of late hours and "routs." Milk-vendors, boasting their descent from the original holders, have still their cow-stall at the park corner under the elm-trees. In the distance the grey old abbey, with its delicate tracery, appears at intervals above the trees and buildings; and, though so near the city smoke, the Ornithological Society breeds many beautiful aquatic birds on a small island on the Ornamental Water. St. James's Park is a series of pictures; the sketcher, too, will find many convenient seats, as well as charming views.
It is difficult to believe that this lovely park was, in pre-Tudor times, merely a swampy field, pertaining to a hospital "for fourteen maidens that were leprous," and far beyond the precincts of the little London of that day. (The lepers' hospital itself stood where now stands St. James's Palace.) It was Henry VIII. who removed the leper maidens, converting their asylum into a palace, their field into a park; a park used as the private garden to the palace until Charles II.'s time, at which period it was made public and laid out by a French landscape gardener called "Le Nôtre." There is a story that Queen Caroline, wife to George II., wished to appropriate the Park once more for the sole use of the Palace, and asked "what it would cost to effect this?" "Only three crowns," was the pithy answer of the minister, Sir Robert Walpole.
Beautiful as St. James's Park still is, it must have been yet more charming a century-and-a-half ago, when no houses as yet intervened between it and the grey dignity of the old Abbey of Westminster, and when the vanished Rosamond's Pond, with its wild and romantic banks, gave a rural attraction to the scene. Rosamond's Pond, mentioned by Pope and other writers, was a favourite trysting-place for lovers, and had also, from its seclusion, a less enviable notoriety for suicides.
Charles II., was especially fond of St. James's Park; he would sit here for hours among his dogs, amusing himself with the tame ducks, that he had himself introduced; the descendants of these ducks, it is said, flourish, like those of the milk-vendors, to this day, and are fed familiarly by constant Londoners. Perhaps it was Charles's fondness for animals that, by a natural sequence of events, caused the park, somewhat later, to become a sort of Zoological Gardens for London. Birds of all kinds still thrive in it, although distant Battersea Park, new and semi-suburban, now claims its share of ornithological fame. The London County Council, among other good works, has adopted towards animals the protecting rôle of Charles II., and sedulously encourages bird-life in the parks; woe, therefore, to the boy or man, who goes bird-nesting or bird-snaring in one of these sacred enclosures! Wild birds reciprocate the Council's paternal care by taking up their lodging in Battersea of their own free will. A cuckoo's egg was even found in Battersea Park lately, laid, very annoyingly, in a "whitethroat's" nest, which had been made in a bamboo-bush in the "sub-tropical" part of the gardens. Nevertheless, the charitable whitethroats overlooked the liberty, and safely hatched that cuckoo. Battersea Park claims, moreover, robins, tits, hedge-sparrows, chaffinches, wrens, and greenfinches; to say nothing of herons, and even a white blackbird. Birds take kindly to London; do not even the gulls come up the river by thousands in severe winters, as the Albatross came to the call of the Ancient Mariner? Also, over 200 wood pigeons are said to roost regularly on the Battersea Park islands. But then, wood-pigeons seem to be everywhere at home in London. Do they not haunt the city gardens that lie behind Queen Square, and coo sweetly all through the London spring and summer?
If Battersea Park, with its charmingly laid-out gardens, its wealth of tropical plants, all its feathered population, and its river glories of twilight and sunset, is yet undistinguished, so also is the Regent's Park, which is situated at quite another, (though equally semi-suburban), angle of the metropolis. Regent's Park, like Battersea Park, is the resort of the great middle-class. Here you may see, on Bank Holidays, the groups so lovingly described by Ibsen, "father, mother, and troop of children," all drest in their Sunday best, and all dropping orange-peel cheerfully as they go. Here too, on Sundays, is a "Church Parade," quite as crowded as that of Hyde Park, though not, perhaps, so largely noticed in the "society" papers. The demeanour of the young couples is perhaps here a trifle more boisterous, that of their elders perhaps a shade more prim; the attire of the ladies, generally, a thought more crude. The wide middle avenue of Regent's Park, on Sundays, affords capital study to those interested in the vast subject of Man and Manners. And then the great middle class is so much more amusing than are the "Well-Connected"!
The flowers in Regent's Park, in spring and early summer, are a yearly marvel and a delight. Not even those of Hyde Park, in all their season's glory, can surpass them. On each side of the large middle avenue, gay parterres vie with one another in brilliance. Tulips, hyacinths of wonderful shades, all the glory of spring bulbs, make way, later, for summer "bedding-out-plants" in lovely combinations of colour. Crocuses, scillas, and snowdrops, too, are scattered here and there, with a charming air of lavishness, over the grassy slopes: this has a delightful effect, giving all the look and suggestion of wild flowers.
Regent's Park has, then, an unrivalled charm to the flower-lover. (And what true Londoner, one may ask, is not a flower-lover? The Londoner loves flowers with an intensity undreamed of in the real country.) The slum children, who frequent this park in large numbers, respect, as a rule, the flower-beds. Slum-children are, generally, as I have observed from experience gathered in the Temple Gardens, St. Paul's Churchyard, Leicester Square and elsewhere,—more reverently inclined, as regards flowers, than their more pampered contemporaries; though, of course, nature is nature, and there may be occasional lapses. Thus, the other day I chanced to notice, in Regent's Park, two small girls "of the people," whose ideas on the subject of "property" seemed just a trifle elementary. They were ragged and hungry-looking too, and to add to the pathos of their rags, one of them flourished a broken green parasol, and the other one's tattered hat flaunted a dirty pink ostrich feather: