The first gate in the Bayswater Road, starting from Kensington Gardens, is called the Victoria Gate, and it is opposite Sussex Place--there is an entrance by the drinking fountain--but there is no other _gate_ till Cumberland Gate, or the Marble Arch, as it is more generally called. Turning down Park Lane we have first Grosvenor Gate, and then Stanhope Gate; whilst on the Knightsbridge side is the principal entrance, or Hyde Park Corner. Next comes Albert Gate, the roadway of which was finished and opened to the public on April 6th, 1842. The present gates were not then erected, nor the noble mansions which stand on either side of the entrance. Then comes the Prince of Wales’ Gate, and the Alexandra Gate--both modern entrances in the Park--and are among the many improvements effected in Queen Victoria’s reign. At its commencement, the Park was not altogether a place of beauty, or of “sweetness and light”--gravel used to be dug there, as we see by the following letter to _The Times_, Oct. 18th, 1838:--“I beg through your columns to remonstrate with the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, on the extreme negligence of leaving the gravel pit in Hyde Park in its present dangerous state. Two sides of it are very deep and precipitous, without any fence whatever to protect the unwary traveller, when darkness conceals the danger from him. I wonder, Sir, that fatal accidents do not nightly happen; if neck or limbs escape fracture in the fall, there is now water enough in the pit to drown anyone stunned by the accident.” There is a letter in _The Times_ of April 11, 1839, from Mr. I. C. Loudon, the eminent authority on gardening--speaking of the improvements which had taken place in the Park during the past five or six years; how the pasture had been renovated by manuring, and other means, the carriage roads had been altered, the footpaths gravelled, and greatest of all, in his estimation, the number of _single_ trees which had been planted in different situations; but he anathematises the planting them in _clumps_, as the Commissioners of Woods and Forests were then doing. Probably this generation, who have benefited by the Commissioners’ planting, will not endorse Mr. Loudon’s opinion, but then letters to _The Times_ are not always temperate, _vide_ the following--in that paper of Feb. 13, 1844:--