“The famous tearing down of the railings of the Park in 1866 was an accident, and almost a joke. A good-humoured crowd had gathered to see what Mr. Edmond Beales and the Reform League would do when the police stopped them from entering the Park. Mr. Beales turned back and went home, and never knew what happened, as he told me himself, till he reached his home at night. The crowd, seeing no fun, began to amuse themselves with singing and climbing up on the railing, which was hardly strong enough, or high enough, to stop a flock of sheep. Suddenly, with shouts of laughter, the rail fell inwards, and the crowd naturally followed, but without a thought of any concerted action. The people got hot and angry on the following days. But the famous Hyde Park Riot of 1866 was a mere street scramble owing to the rotten state of the old railing.” These are the words of a living writer, and yet how much is changed. Cricket on the site of Westbourne Terrace seems almost as remote as the hundreds, aye, thousands, of hangings that took place near where the Marble Arch now stands. There stood Tyburn, probably the most gruesome, gory spot in the whole of the British Isles. The brick wall has long since disappeared, and even the inner railings between the side-walks and the road have almost all gone. Wisely Tyburn has been swept away by its later rulers. Not a vestige of the name survives to remind the passers-by that it once existed, except on the iron tablet which marks the site of the old turnpike gate, and bears the following inscription: [Illustration: HERE STOOD TYBURN GATE 1829] This iron plate is about 4 feet high, and is a little to the west of the clock-house at the Marble Arch, just opposite Edgware Road. So it was well within the last hundred years that Tyburn Gate disappeared. Hyde Park, as a place for intrigue, strongly appealed to the dramatist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and has been immortalised by many poets. Ben Jonson speaks of it in the Prologue of _The Staple News_, and in _The World in the Moon_ (1620). An old ballad in the Roxburgh Collection sings: “Of all parts of England, Hyde Park hath the name For coaches and horses and persons of Fame.” Shirley, too, named one of his plays _Hyde Park_, and laid his plot within its boundaries. Pepys went to see the performance of the play, and formed a poor opinion of it. Other authors have written of the Park in this sense, as a background for dramatic tales of intrigue; such as Etherage in _The Man of Mode_ (1676), Howard in _The English Monsieur_ (1674), Southerne in _The Maid’s Last Prayer_ (1693), Farquhar in _The Constant Couple_ (1700), and Congreve in _The Way of the World_ (1760). From those far distant days to the present Hyde Park has never lost its prestige as a meeting-place for all classes of English Society; and the present volume is an attempt to depict its story in a more or less connected form.