Not less has Dickens done with the lower life of the Great City. And has not Miss Thackeray (Mrs. Ritchie), with a touch of her father's picturesque and vivid genius, glorified that "Old Court Suburb," Old Kensington, in her well-known novel of that name? Here, in Kensington, at No. 2, Palace Green, then considerably more countrified than now, Thackeray died in 1863. Here, too, is the red brick Kensington Palace, built by William and Mary in what Leigh Hunt called "Dutch solidity," famous as Queen Victoria's birth-place, and also more sadly reminiscent of poor Caroline of Brunswick, the ill-fated and cruelly used wife of George IV. Holland House is one of the most interesting and historically important buildings in Kensington. It stands near Campden Hill, in beautiful and spacious gardens, the same gardens where the youthful George III. used to flirt with the lovely Sarah Lennox; the lady dressed as a shepherdess, playing at haymaking while the King rode by: a youthful and a pleasant idyll, in contrast with the lady's very chequered after life! Holland House, says Mr. Hare, "surpasses all other houses in beauty, rising at the end of the green slope, with its richly-sculptured terrace, and its cedars, and its vases of brilliant flowers." The house was originally built in 1607, though its characteristic wings and arcades were all added later by the first Earl of Holland, the same who was beheaded in the Royalist wars. After his execution Holland House was confiscated by the Parliamentary generals; being, however, restored in 1665 to the disconsolate widow, who comforted herself by indulging privately here in the theatricals so strictly forbidden by the Puritan Government. Early in the eighteenth century Holland House became associated with Addison (of _Spectator_ fame); he lived here for some three years after his ambitious marriage with Charlotte, Countess of Warwick, a marriage which, despite its splendour, report says was not happy for the bridegroom. According to Dr. Johnson, it was more or less "on terms like those on which a Turkish princess is espoused, to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce, 'Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave.'" But the chief interest of Holland House lies in its having been for so many years the centre of a great literary and political _coterie_, and the resort of Whig orators and politicians. In the lifetime of the third Lord Holland, who died in 1840, the house was at the height of its splendour as a world-renowned intellectual centre. Holland House still exists in its integrity, though Macaulay long ago prophesied mournfully that "The wonderful city may soon displace those turrets and gardens which are associated with so much that is interesting and noble--with the courtly magnificence of Rich, with the loves of Ormond, with the councils of Cromwell, with the death of Addison."