Caroline was also devoted to the then fashionable craze of gardening, and was continually planning and altering at Kensington. It was at her instance--as we shall see presently in greater detail--that the large extent of land, formerly the park of old Nottingham House, and also a portion of Hyde Park, was laid out, planted, and improved into what we now know as "Kensington Gardens." Queen Caroline died in 1737, while George II. survived her twenty-three years, expiring at Kensington Palace on the morning of the 25th of October, 1760, at the age of seventy-eight. His end was extremely sudden. He appeared to be in his usual health, when a heavy fall was heard in his dressing-room after breakfast. The attendants hurried in, to find the King lying on the floor, with his head cut open by falling against a bureau. The right ventricle of his heart had burst. =Kensington in George III.'s Reign.= George II. was the last sovereign to occupy Kensington Palace, which thenceforth, during the long reign of George III., was left almost entirely neglected and deserted. Several members of the royal family, however, occupied, at various periods, suites of apartments in the Palace. Among others, Caroline of Brunswick, when Princess of Wales, lived for a short time here with her mother. Her behaviour greatly scandalized the sober-minded inhabitants of the old court suburb. "She kept a sort of open house, receiving visitors in a dressing-gown, and sitting and talking about herself with strangers, on the benches in the garden, at the risk of being discovered." Another but more worthy occupant of the Palace in George III.'s reign was our present Queen's uncle, the Duke of Sussex, who collected a magnificent library here of nearly fifty thousand volumes, which he spent the last years of his life in arranging and cataloguing. Destined, however, to invest Kensington Palace with associations and memories far transcending any that have gone before, was the advent here of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, seven months after their marriage. They occupied most of the old state rooms on the first and second floors of the easternmost portion of the Palace. Three lives then stood between the duke and the throne, and little could the newly-married pair have imagined that from their union would spring the future Queen and Empress of such a vast and mighty empire as now owns the sway of their first and only child. =Birth of Queen Victoria.=