Surrounded by the palaces of the rich, the resort of the favoured ones of the earth, for whose wealth and ostentation it provides a fitting background; it forms also the refuge of the vicious and the destitute, and, alas, its green sward serves as the dormitory of filthy vagrants, whose very existence in this city of boundless wealth is an eyesore and a reproach. There, vice and virtue still jostle each other, poverty and riches, greed and simplicity: there, every creed is expounded, every grievance aired, every nostrum advocated with violent vociferation hard by the spot where, upon the fatal Triple Tree of Tyburn, scores of miserable martyrs went to their doom for daring to put into words the thoughts that were their own. The Park now extends from Park Lane to Kensington Gardens, and from the Bayswater Road to Knightsbridge; but the creation of Kensington Gardens in the reign of George II.—sheltering the Royal Palace where Queen Victoria was born in 1819—robbed Hyde Park of 300 acres of land. Queen Caroline devoted much time and thought to the formation of the Serpentine and the beautifying of the surroundings of her Palace. Roughly speaking, Hyde Park is about 3¼ miles round, or covers an extent of 360 acres. This is by no means enormous, not as large as the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, nor as wild as _Thier gaarten_ in Berlin, but there are trees in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens which far surpass in bulk and beauty the trees of either of these Continental rivals. We have in Hyde Park none of the “ancestral statues” such as Berlin has to represent the noble army of the Kaiser’s forebears. Our Park is not quite like the Castellana in Madrid, where fashion drives from the Prado during the dusk, shut up in truly Spanish fashion in closed carriages, or the Prater in Vienna, where so many beautiful women may be seen; nor is it nearly as large as the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, which, however, is more of wild common than cultivated land. Hyde Park differs from all these; and Hyde Park stands within a huge city, and not a mile or two outside. It is not newly planted or freshly made, and some of the trees within its railings, dating back through many centuries, would be hard to rival in any land. So interesting, indeed, are the trees and shrubs and plants, the birds and beasts, that a list will be found in an appendix. At an early period in the history of Great Britain, this district must have been part of the vast forest that lay inland from the little British settlement, founded on the banks of the Thames before the Romans landed. These early inhabitants of London lived in rude huts, probably stretching from where the Tower now stands to Dowgate, their simple tenements forming the beginning of the present great throbbing heart of the Empire.