So much for the parish. Now look at the Court suburb; so small in comparison with the parish, that it may be compared to a shrivelled kernel in a nutshell. There, in the centre, stood the old Parish Church, pronounced by Bishop Blomfield the ugliest in the country; and in Church Street, higher up, the Vicarage was encompassed by a goodly garden and small park, now covered by rows of houses. Quaint-looking tenements bordered Church Street a little way. Campden House and grounds retained a palatial appearance. A row of brick dwellings, taking us back to the days of the first Georges, still line Holland Street, and were then in their prime. Hornton Street looked out, in spring, upon blooming orchards. The road between Kensington Palace Gate and Holland House was, as it still is, the main thoroughfare; and I conclude that Phillimore Place, called by the Prince Regent “Dish-clout Row,” from its tasteless slabs in front, was then in pristine pride. Kensington Square, though shorn of the glories it possessed under the first two Georges—when it boasted of forty coaches, and of lords and ladies occupying the buildings round it—still presented much quiet respectability; and old inhabitants, as they passed by the palace gates, could tell of having heard from their fathers and mothers how one morning there issued thence “Horse Guards with their trumpets, and a company of heralds with their tabards, to proclaim, after Queen Anne’s death, George, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith.” All round, the Court suburb was separated from neighbouring hamlets by a belt of orchards, gardens, and nursery grounds; and the road between Kensington Gardens and Knightsbridge remained notorious for its loneliness and perils. Opposite Hyde Park were a few aristocratic mansions, with spacious lawns, shrubberies, and gardens bounded by lofty walls; but the road was often in very bad repair. In the middle of the century, Lord Hervey told his mother it was impassable, and that in Kensington he lived “in the same solitude as he should do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean.” {11} Matters might have mended somewhat at the time the chapel was built, but a good old pew-opener, Mr. Mundy, told me how he remembered that people at Knightsbridge, bound for Kensington after dark, would wait till they made a number large enough to defend themselves against the footpads who infested the thoroughfare. The old half-way house and the turnpike gate, symbolical of ancient days, lingered so late as the middle of my own ministry.