Kew Gardens

Aiton was a son of the soil, driven out of his own Lanarkshire Eden by poverty, who, like so many other Scots unwelcome to Wilkes and Johnson, came to seek fortune in London. He got a place at the Physic Garden of Chelsea, and thence, perhaps by patronage of Bute, was put in charge of the Princess Dowager’s Botanic Garden, whose reputation throve with his own. His functions must have grown beyond the limits of the Botanic Garden, then only a few acres, for this was the Scotsman who set Cobbett to work, among other jobs, at sweeping up leaves by the Pagoda, on the farther side of the Kew grounds. John Rogers, who worked in the gardens at this time, says that on the death of the elder Haverfield, Aiton came into the entire management both at Kew and Richmond. His first appointment was in the last year of George II. A quarter of a century later, we find him clearly head of the whole establishment. Aiton certainly rose to be no mere working gardener, who published a catalogue of the plants at Kew. He held his post till towards the end of the century, and was then succeeded by his son William Townsend Aiton, to rule at Kew for half a century more; while another son, John, had charge of the royal gardens at Windsor and at Kensington. [Illustration: THE AZALEAS] In the Aiton succession, we come across the fact that a talent for the study of plants is apt to be hereditary. There were two Linnés, not equal in fame, four De Jussieus, three De Candolles, three Darwins of different degrees of note in science; and for more than a century Kew Gardens were under the two dynasties of Aitons and Hookers. In the reign of William Aiton the second, among Scotsmen finding employment in Kew Gardens was a William Macnab, who rose to be foreman here, and in 1810 went to the Edinburgh Botanical Garden as curator or principal gardener. One cannot propitiate Dr. Johnson’s Manes by describing the Edinburgh Garden as a branch from Kew. It is, in fact, an older institution, founded in Charles II.’s reign, and now grown into a model, both of _utile_ and _dulce_, worthy the Modern Athens. The point I have to make is that William Macnab was succeeded at Edinburgh by his son James Macnab, godfather of the _Cupressus Macnabiana_, etc., who managed this garden till his death, 1878, and whose only son, William Ramsay Macnab, bade fair, through a too short life, to continue the family distinction in the botanical world. This botanist by birth and birthplace was a schoolfellow of mine, whose early career deserves notice. His masters could have seen little promise in such a scholar, for, under the _régime_ then styled education, our lessons simply did not interest him, and I often wondered how he picked up the _quantum_ of Latin necessary for his medical examinations. But at fourteen he printed a monograph, either on ferns or on seaweeds, of which I had a copy but cannot lay hands on it. At the same age he gave a lecture on plant life, illustrated by diagrams prepared by himself. He also excited the wondering admiration of his schoolfellows by practising the then young art of photography. Before reaching school days, he had bought his first microscope. Not yet out of his teens, he had what I had heard called the best collection of beetles in Scotland. About this time I accompanied him and some older scientific adventurers on a natural history expedition to the Bass Rock, when, unfortunately, all the pundits were so overcome by sea-sickness, that nothing could then be added to the stock of knowledge. Macnab left our school in dudgeon against a master who, having prescribed an essay on starch, not unnaturally accused him of plagiarising an elaborate composition based on original experiment. From another school he went early to Edinburgh University, and if I am not mistaken, to Germany, where he used his time so well that he had to wait some months to come of age for taking his M.D. degree at twenty-one. After a short digression into lunacy practice, he followed his bent in a professorship of Natural History at the Agricultural College of Cirencester, and soon became Botany Professor at the Royal College of Science, Dublin. There he died prematurely, else his life would surely have figured on some more authoritative pages than mine. The last time I saw him, if I remember right, he was staying at Kew, engaged in some work or study in the Gardens where his grandfather had been foreman. The above digression relates to the fact that the Kew gardeners were apt to be kinsmen, or at least kindly Scots. Macnab, Lockhart, Begbie, Kerr, Fraser, Morison--these are only some names occurring early among the staff to show how the Aiton dynasty did not overlook their countrymen’s claims to employment. If not scientific men themselves, the Aitons had the advice and help of the best naturalists of their day, specially of Sir Joseph Banks, Captain Cook’s companion, who introduced to this country the fuchsia, the hydrangea, and other exotic plants. Under this President of the Royal Society, less distinguished collectors were sent out to all parts of the world, sometimes in ships of war, to procure specimens for Kew. Two such emissaries were on board the _Bounty_ on its celebrated voyage, one of them sticking by the commander, the other going off with the mutineers. To the honour of Banks, it is told that when consignments of rare specimens intended for the royal gardens at Paris were captured by our cruisers, he several times used his influence to have them sent on intact, a scientific courtesy that repaid the orders of the French Government to treat Cook’s vessels as neutral, when war with England broke out during his last expedition. Banks, indeed, a wealthy man who sought no salaried post, appears to have been practically the scientific authority of Kew Gardens in his lifetime, well deserving the royal confidence, though he came in for his share of caricaturing as a Court favourite. His picture, and those of other noted botanists, are treasured in the Kew Museums, where the mere literary man will often be put to shame to find how many names he never heard, live not forgotten among the votaries of a special study. Under Aiton the second, Kew Gardens began to fall off, lying as they did in the shade of royal neglect. George IV. began by showing some interest in them, which soon withered away. They were opened to “all well-dressed strangers” on Sundays in summer, the Botanic Garden being accessible at other times to those who took an interest in it; but the empty palace no longer attracted people of fashion, and for the ordinary citizen Kew was still rather out of the way, though “stages” left Piccadilly every quarter of an hour in the season, and in 1808 there were already “houses of entertainment” on Kew Green, as we find particularised in a guide-book of that date. Later on, the Gardens were open every day except Sunday. But by this time they were ceasing to be attractive. Aiton had been appointed director of all the royal parks and gardens, employment which appears to have taken off his attention from Kew, where money as well as interest ran short. The part kept up shrank to the dozen or score acres of the original Botanic Gardens, the rest relapsing into thickets that made a game preserve for Ernest, King of Hanover. A formidable rival was the Horticultural Society’s Garden at Turnham Green, recently removed to Wisley Common. By the beginning of Victoria’s reign, the Kew Gardens had fallen so low that there was a talk of breaking them up and dispersing the collection, to the indignation of the inhabitants, who had an old grievance that they had given part of their Green to enlarge this royal property, on the understanding that they were to be freely admitted to its amenities. From such extinction Kew was rescued in 1840 by the report of a parliamentary committee, upon which steps were taken and funds provided for bringing the Gardens to their present position at once as a popular resort and as a national scientific collection, while still they remained nominally a royal demesne. Aiton being pensioned off, Sir W. J. Hooker, formerly Botanical Professor at Glasgow, was appointed Director. Here appears another case of heredity, for Hooker was the son of a botanist, and came to be replaced by his own son. [Illustration: THE PEONIES] Under his management the Gardens grew apace, the botanic part being much enlarged, while the Museums of Economic Botany were now set on foot. Decimus Burton, the fashionable architect of his day, was called in to design new buildings like the Palm House, unrivalled in England unless by Paxton’s Great Conservatory at Chatworth, which was the model of the Crystal Palace. To make room for such useful structures, a sweep had to be made of many of the fanciful “temples” and other gimcrackeries of the Georgian age, specimens of which are still dotted about the grounds, now laid out on a principle of compromise with formality, “the aim being to weave the various collections of trees and shrubs into a whole, which should avoid an artificial and yet yield an agreeable effect, while still subserving a definite purpose.” In 1865, Sir W. J. Hooker was succeeded by Sir J. D. Hooker, who in his younger days had made adventurous journeys to the Himalayas and elsewhere in the interest of botanical science. He still lives at a good old age, after twenty years’ service having given place to his son-in-law, Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, who also has gone on the _emeritus_ list; and the present head is Colonel Prain, whose experience in India should give a new strain of efficiency. Sir Joseph Hooker’s management was marked by a vehement quarrel between him and his official superior, Mr. Ayrton, head of the Board of Works, a Kew man by birth, who perhaps for that reason felt himself the more moved to aggressive interference. The scientific world warmly took up the cause of its _confrère_; and Ayrton earned general unpopularity by his overbearing tone; but Sir Algernon West, then Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Gladstone, after having had a good deal of trouble over arranging the dispute, gives us his opinion that there were faults on both sides. It is understood that in the management of the Gardens there has been sometimes a certain friction between the demands of a scientific establishment and of a scene for popular recreation. But these two ideas seem now fairly harmonised. With the exception of isolated _penetralia_, the Gardens are open from 10 or 12 A.M. till sunset, and on Sunday afternoons. This was one of the first of our public institutions to be thrown open on Sunday, by the influence, it is said, of Prince Albert prevailing over the Sabbatarian austerity that dominated Mrs. Proudie’s generation. As the Kew Gardens flourished, those of Richmond had withered away. The royal pleasure-grounds on that side were turned into George III.’s model farm, then into a park, which has become a golf-course and a recreation-ground, though it was only the other day that its quasi-public character came to be fully recognised by a foot-bridge thrown over the muddy moat cutting off this enclosure from the river-bank. The site of Richmond Lodge is approximately marked by the Observatory, built for George III. by Sir William Chambers, with a special view to the transit of Venus observed by Cook and Banks from Tahiti. When Kew Gardens were taken under the wing of Parliament, the Royal Society refused a free gift of this building; but it was kept going by subscriptions, then under the auspices of the Board of Trade became a Meteorological Station, with the important function of testing instruments like barometers, thermometers, and sextants, to be hall-marked with the initials of Kew Observatory. But of late years it proved not secluded enough for this work, the electric currents induced by tramways threatening its most delicate operations, so that the magnetic branch was recently transplanted to the wilds of Dumfries, where also, one hears, it had a narrow escape from interference in being housed in walls at first chosen from an ironstone quarry. Other parts of the work are now carried on at the new Physical Laboratory in Bushy Park. A ha-ha fence cuts off Richmond Old Deer Park, as it is called, from Kew Gardens, which in all cover a space of some 250 acres. The wire fence has gone that marked the now hardly valid distinction between the Botanic Garden proper and the former pleasure-grounds. Queen Victoria showed her interest in the institution by granting successive stretches of private garden, to be added to what had become practically a public one. At the end of her reign the so-called Kew Palace, the old “Dutch House,” was given up to be opened as a museum of pictures and other relics of its history. This is soon reached by the broad walk leading straight on from the chief entrance gates on Kew Green. The Victoria Gate, on the Richmond Road, is the approach for visitors coming from Kew Station. There are other entrances both from the Richmond Road and from the riverside, where, opposite Brentford’s wharves, one closed gate reminds us how this was once a royal home. [Illustration: THE PALM TREES AND MAIN GATE] IV THE VILLAGE: IN AND ABOUT IT Kew itself does not stand in the forefront of its own story, for long remaining little more than an obscure river-side hamlet, half a dozen miles out of London, connected by a ferry with Brentford, and with its quaint little neighbour Strand-on-the-Green, which might have risen to equal note had Gunnersbury or Chiswick taken a king’s fancy. It was not till the eighteenth century that Kew began to burgeon under royal favour; and for the first half of that century, Richmond lay basking on the sunnier side of patronage. When George III. left Richmond for Kew, the quiet village blossomed forth as in a forcing-house, to grow into a banyan grove of princely dwellings. The first distinguished resident mentioned is Sir Peter Lely, as having a country house on the Green, where the Herbarium now stands. From first to last he may have been a good deal in this neighbourhood, for he painted Charles I. at Hampton Court, and after doing the same service for Cromwell, he became the fashionable artist of Charles II.’s Court, whose frail beauties still live on his canvas. His successor in vogue was Sir Godfrey Kneller, who contributed to artistic vocabulary in his portraits of the Kit-Cat Club, that had its rendezvous at Barn Elms, now the Ranelagh Club. He also settled not far off, in the house behind Twickenham named Kneller Hall, that, after various vicissitudes, has become the Army School of Music. Swift, in his letters to Stella, mentions dining with the Duke of Argyll at Kew in 1712. I do not find any other allusion to this residence: perhaps Swift landed at Kew and went on to Sudbrook Park, where the Duke had a seat, that should rather be reckoned as belonging to Petersham, united with Kew as one dependent district of the Kingston parish. This mansion was near the famous avenues of his birthplace, the Duke of Lauderdale’s Ham House, said to have been originally intended for Prince Henry, son of James I., and chosen by the Lords of the Council as a fitting retreat for James II., when the Prince of Orange was about to enter London. It would be the convenience of water transit that had dotted the Thames side with lordly mansions and villas; and of course it should be borne in mind how, at a time when the Court could be spoken of as moving from Kensington to London, places like Kew and Richmond were practically as far from town as now are Haslemere or Missenden, while the champaign rusticity of the former would be more to the taste of Cowley’s and Pope’s generations. Kew is said to have had some sort of chapel before the Reformation; but it was not till 1714 that its church was built, the brick building on the Green, that, with additions and dubious ornaments, has mellowed into a specimen of what may be called the ugly picturesque. The excrescence at the east end marks the sepulchral chamber containing the Duke of Cambridge’s tomb. The organ is understood to have been Handel’s, and to have been played on by George III. The gallery, added in 1805, still keeps its dusty state as a royal pew, though now used on occasion for less illustrious worshippers. Both inside and outside are many memorials to persons, famous or forgotten, some of whom must presently be mentioned. In the close-packed churchyard an unusual number of foreign names seem related to the German colony of Queen Charlotte’s attendants, and to the Hanover connection long kept up through the Dukes of Cambridge and Cumberland, the former of these princes having acted as regent or viceroy of Hanover till the Salic law put his unbeloved brother on its throne. One of the early ministers at Kew was that Stephen Duck, already mentioned, who began life as a Wiltshire labourer, then by dint of self-education came to be known as the “thresher-poet,” taken up by Queen Caroline, to the jealousy of unpatronised poets like Swift. She settled a pension on him, made him first a Yeoman of the Guard, then, as a post more suitable to the poet than to the peasant, Keeper of her library at Richmond. He married her housekeeper at Kew; and one takes to be his daughters the Misses Duck, who half a century later are found in charge of the Dutch House, the last of them living till 1818. The father’s ambition led him on to take Orders; and he preached with much acceptation at Kew Chapel. Before long he had been put into the Rectory of Byfleet under St. George’s Hill; then, a few years later, only fifty years old, he drowned himself in a fit of dejection. But for the merit of being able “to burst his life’s invidious bar,” he hardly deserved patronage, his verses being a mere echo of the epithetical commonplaces of a generation whose rhyming shepherds hardly knew a crook from a flail. Perhaps the most readable of his effusions is _The Thresher’s Labour_, an account of a farm-servant’s life, in which now and then he drops pseudo-Arcadianism for touches of human nature and actual experience. Soon as the rising Sun has drank the Dew, Another Scene is open to our View: Our Master comes, and at his heels a Throng Of prattling Females, armed with Rake and Prong; Prepared, whilst he is here, to make his Hay; Or, if he turns his Back, prepared to play; But here, or gone, sure of this comfort still, Here’s Company, so they may chat their Fill. Ah! were their hands so active as their Tongues, How nimbly then would move the Rakes and Prongs! In 1769, the Kew Chapel of ease was promoted to be a parish Church. Some ten years before this, Kew had another rise in life by the building of a bridge, under an Act of Parliament obtained by the owner of the ferry. There had also been a ford at low water. The first wooden bridge was a somewhat makeshift structure, which after a quarter of a century or so became replaced by another, standing to the beginning of the present century, when a new Kew Bridge was opened by Edward VII., the old one condemned as too steep of access. Its bridge gave Kew an advantage not easily realised by our generation. Putney Bridge was only a little older, though a bridge of boats had been thrown across the river there at the time of the Civil War. Westminster Bridge was not built till 1738, an improvement hotly opposed by various vested interests, the cry being that it would ruin the City as well as the watermen. For centuries, unless by water, the Thames could not be crossed between London Bridge and Kingston. This fact explains the roundabout manner of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s attack upon the City in that ill-managed insurrection against the Spanish marriage that cost Lady Jane Grey’s head as well as his own. In my youth, at least, one was apt to take one’s notion of his proceedings from Harrison Ainsworth’s _Tower of London_, where a desperate storm of the Tower is described, with fierce hand-to-hand fighting, on the model of a like scene in _Ivanhoe_. But this was all imagination. As a matter of fact, Wyatt failed to get across London Bridge, the drawbridge in the middle having been taken up and the gate beyond being stoutly guarded against his advance. The Southwark people, who had welcomed him to the Borough, begged him to be gone when the Tower guns were turned upon their homes. Setting out in the morning, hampered by cannon to be dragged along through miry ways, he did not get to Kingston till well on in the afternoon. Here, too, the bridge had been broken, but its defenders fled from his guns; some sailors swam across to fetch back barges moored on the farther side; the gap was hastily repaired with planks; then before midnight he was able to continue his march. A gun breaking down delayed him at Brentford, then perhaps the Kew people were for the nonce rather thankful not to have a bridge, as that force passed by to assail London on the Middlesex side. So must they have been in the next century, when across the river they could hear the shouts and shots with which Royalists set Roundheads flying through the narrow streets of Brentford. The bridge put Kew upon improving its roads. The King, at his own expense, to give work for the unemployed in winter, had a carriage-way made to Richmond, hitherto reached directly by a rough lane. Then the inhabitants of surrounding parishes got up a subscription to mend the ways on the Surrey side from Putney Bridge “in order that His Majesty may not be obliged to take the dusty road from Brentford when he honours them with his residence in summer.” So now we come to Kew’s palmy days, in the seventies of the eighteenth century, while George and Charlotte lived much here, before their flitting to Windsor; and many new houses were built to accommodate the attendants and hangers-on of the rustic Court. Mrs. Papendiek, who was brought up at Kew, gives us glimpses of the village in its state of transformation, among them such a curious one as this:-- The farmhouse, now Hollis’s, was Mrs. Clewly’s, who supplied the inhabitants with milk, butter, eggs, pork and bacon. She, becoming a widow, married a Mr. Frame, whose son, by a former marriage, lived upon housebreaking and footpad robberies. Upon his father becoming an inhabitant of Kew, the question was inquired into, when he said: “I always take care to act so as to escape justice. Blows and murders belong not to my gang; and if I am allowed to take my beer on the Green, and sit with my neighbours, without being insulted, I shall take care that no harm happen here. I am well aware of the bearings of the place.” We all spoke with him as a friend when we met; and of my father he asked for any trifle he wanted, and was never refused. This diarist had not always such a friendly experience of highwaymen, for on their way back from Vauxhall to Kew, her party was stopped and robbed at Mortlake. The encounter was so little expected that Mr. Papendiek had laid away his new watch in a corner of the coach, and when our schoolgirl, as she then was, heard the robbers say that the ladies should not be molested, she hid the watch for him; then, on her giving it back to its owner, the danger past, he rewarded her by making sheep’s eyes, which in time brought about a marriage. But it was soon not necessary for Kew folk to seek amusement so far off as Vauxhall, for, as the lady tells us of 1776--“Kew now became quite gay, the public being admitted to the Richmond Gardens on Sundays, and to Kew Gardens on Thursdays. The Green on these days was covered with carriages, more than £300 being often taken at the bridge on Sundays. Their Majesties were to be seen at the windows speaking to their friends, and the royal children amusing themselves in their own gardens. Parties came up by water, too, with bands of music, to sit opposite the Prince of Wales’s house. The whole was a scene of enchantment and delight; Royalty living among their subjects to give pleasure and to do good.” The brothers of Granville Sharpe, the philanthropist, kept moored at Fulham a notable fleet of pleasure-boats, one of them a barge or “yacht,” serving as house-boat in summer, on which the owners took trips up the Thames, sometimes stopping to serenade the royal family or to have the honour of receiving on board the King and Queen, or the young princes under care of their tutors. This stretch of the Thames is said to have been the nursery of pleasure-boating; but though a canoe and a shallop are enumerated among the Sharpes’ craft, we do not yet hear of fine gentlemen, still less ladies, undertaking to row themselves. The village began to grow apace, old houses being pulled down or enlarged, and new ones built towards Richmond along what is now the thoroughfare of a big London suburb. The population was swollen by all sorts of newcomers--from ladies-in-waiting to gardeners, from preceptors to soldiers, for a guard was kept at Kew House, near which barracks had to be provided. One winter, the King is said to have found work for his idle garrison by setting them to make the Hollow Walk, now filled with such a fine summer show of rhododendrons. There would be no want of church services then at a place well equipped with scholars and divines. Mrs. Papendiek mentions two bishops as living at Kew, besides subordinate tutors of the princes. While the royal family were in residence, they had at hand Sir John Pringle, “physician to the Person,” and one or other of the brothers Cæsar and Pennell Hawkins, the royal surgeons, “for the Queen would have two of them always on the spot to watch the constitutions of the royal children.” Later on, as we saw, the King’s illness brought a swarm of medical men about Kew, at least as lodgers or visitors. Rather earlier, Lord Bute, who was but a poor nobleman till enriched through his wife, the celebrated Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s daughter, appears to have occupied two houses on Kew Green, that now known as Cambridge Cottage, and the Church House, described as his study, perhaps used by him for a botanical collection. His interest in botany, one must recall, was the foundation of Kew Gardens. He privately printed for the Queen’s benefit a work on the subject in nine quarto volumes; and when he moved to a more lordly home at Luton, his first care was to form there a large botanical garden of his own. [Illustration: THE RHODODENDRON WALK] The servants of the royal house, too, required accommodation, which was by no means humble in every case, for some of them must have made a good thing out of their places. Miss Amelia Murray, whose mother had a post about the princesses later on, tells us how “a bottle of wine every two days, and unnecessary wax candles, were, I remember, the perquisites of the ladies’ maids. Candles were extinguished as soon as lit, to be carried off by servants; pages were seen marching out before the royal family with a bottle of wine sticking out of each pocket; and the State page called regularly on each person who attended the drawing-rooms, with his book, to receive the accustomed gratuity.” In earlier days at Kew, George and Charlotte may have been able to keep a sharper eye on waste; but their economy would always be counterweighed by custom and flunkeydom. Mrs. Papendiek, brought up in the air of the backstairs, has much to say on matters of concern to those high-minded servants, their jealousies, their stifled quarrels, their pickings, the unworthiness of saving in a king’s household, and such like. She mentions incidentally a footman named Fortnum leaving the service to set up as a grocer in Piccadilly, where his name would wax into renown. Another name now brought to note in London was Almack’s, the Earl of Bute’s butler, _né_ M’Call, a form which this canny Aberdonian, in view of his countrymen’s unpopularity, thought well to anglify thus in appealing for fashionable patronage. The taste for music fostered by the royal family drew many professional players into the neighbourhood, mostly foreigners, such as J. C. Bach, son of the great composer; Abel, the viol da gamba player; and Fischer, Gainsborough’s son-in-law, celebrated for his performances on the oboe, all of whom were well known to Mrs. Papendiek as an amateur in their art. The arts of design were also well represented by foreigners, at a period when John Bull affected the pride of being still rather stockish and shy with the Muses. We hear of Mr. Englehart as living on the road to Richmond, one of several of the name who rose to note as artists or engravers. Another German, who practised as a limner or miniature-painter--the photographers of that day--and who appears to have designed the coinage of that reign, was Jeremiah Meyer, so thriving as to have a home at Kew as well as one in town. Mrs. Papendiek states that he caught his death by a dutiful visit of inquiry at Kew House after the King’s first serious illness; Meyer had himself been ailing, and on that errand he suffered from the ill-humour of the page Ernst--once George’s favourite attendant, but about this time in disgrace--who “kept poor Meyer waiting for him in a room that had just been washed, and which was therefore cold and damp. He returned home in haste, but fresh cold succeeded. A relapse came on, and poor Meyer was no more.” He has a monument in Kew Church, with an epitaph by Hayley. Mrs. Papendiek’s chief friends among the artistic colony settled hereabouts were the Zoffanys, who had a house at Strand on the Green, where indeed the master was not always at home. That erratic German genius, John Zoffany, having studied art in Italy, sought fortune in London, like other esurient foreigners. After an ordeal of poverty, he rose to note by his theatrical portraits, and came for a time into the sun of Court patronage. His speciality was portrait groups like that which was to include with the Vicar of Wakefield’s family “as many sheep as the painter would put in for nothing.” He painted one such of George III. and his family, and a notable one of his brethren in the then young Royal Academy, founded under this King, who was an interested, if not very discriminating, patron of art. Another of his celebrated pictures, _The Last Supper_--in which St. Peter is said to be his own portrait, and for the rest of the Apostles Thames-side fishermen sat as models--he gave for an altar-piece to the church at Brentford. At the height of his renown, Zoffany went off to Italy for years, with a commission from the King to copy the _Tribune_ of the Uffizi Gallery at Florence. This task he executed well, but as in his absence he had accepted other commissions from Kaiser Joseph II., and the title of Baron, an honour resented by George for a British subject, he seems to have lost the royal favour. Again, in a fit of disgust or adventurousness, he started off to India, where he must have had a wide field much to himself as a portrait painter, and thence brought back gorgeous pictures of _A Tiger Hunt_ and _A Cock Fight_, to revive his vogue in England. The latter picture had the curious history of costing an estate to a young Irishman who figures in it, his father, Robert Gregory, having threatened to disinherit him if ever he took part in cock-fighting. Mrs. Papendiek grew up intimate with Mrs. Zoffany, though this lady was looked on askance in the genteel society of Kew, having been a girl of humble birth, seduced by the painter at fourteen and married afterwards on the death of a deserted wife. She so far lived down the rather squalidly romantic story of her youth that her daughter’s hand was sought by a rich suitor, Colonel Martin of Leeds Castle, who shut himself up here in single cursedness when the obstinate young lady insisted on marrying a plain and awkward young man named Horn, whose father kept a prosperous school at Chiswick, a match that turned out ill--for the couple and for the school. Zoffany, his wanderings at an end, lived into the eighteenth century at Strand on the Green, and was buried in Kew Churchyard, by the east end of the church. On the south side, under the wall, are close together the graves of Meyer, Kirby, and Gainsborough, the last under a tomb restored in our time. Thomas Gainsborough lies here, not as a Kew resident, but buried by his own desire beside his lifelong friend and fellow East Anglian, Joshua Kirby, F.R.S., who began life as a coach-painter at Ipswich, and rose to fame as a writer on art and architecture. Helped on by Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, Kirby had the luck to become teacher of perspective drawing to Prince George, and the King liked this master so well as to give him a permanent appointment as Clerk of the Works set on foot in Kew Gardens, under Sir William Chambers. At a house by the ferry-side he passed the rest of his life in ease and respect; but to our generation may be best known as father of Mrs. Trimmer, and uncle of William Kirby, the entomologist.