About the same time as Mrs. Gwyn, died Francis Bauer, a half-century resident at Kew, brought there by Sir Joseph Banks to exercise his remarkable skill as a natural history draughtsman. At the end of the eighteenth century he had brought out a volume of delineations of the exotic plants in the Gardens; and many of his plates lie still unpublished at South Kensington. It is said that in 1827 he laid before the Royal Society a paper by J. N. de Niepce, another foreigner living at Kew, who sought in vain to draw attention to some such process as was afterwards developed by Daguerre, so that Kew may claim to be a cradle of photography. While we are on the head of art, Hofland the painter should be mentioned as having been brought up at Kew; also his wife, the once popular novelist Barbara Hofland, who wrote a book about the Richmond neighbourhood, sumptuously illustrated in the style of its day (1832), with much the same aim as the present volume, but containing a larger proportion of fine words to a smaller stock of matter. [Illustration: THE ROSARY] We now approach our own time, in which Kew seems more favoured by authors than by artists. An inhabitant still remembered is Sir Arthur Helps, Clerk of the Privy Council, and recorder of those “Friends in Council” who were so familiar to readers of the last generation; nor does the mild wisdom of “Milverton,” “Ellesmere” and the rest, deserve to seem out of date. Perhaps his most enduring work will be the narratives in which he told the dark story of Spanish American conquest, with its dubious heroes. He acted as editor for Queen Victoria’s first confidences in print; and she granted him a residence at Kew Cottage, near the chief gates. To a member of his family whom I count among my friends, I am indebted for threads of information woven into these pages. I can speak from acquaintance of another Kew resident, Richard Proctor, the well-known writer and lecturer on astronomy, editor of _Knowledge_ and a high authority upon whist, to which his devotion was so sincere that he never would play for money. Yet he won a prize at the card-table, for, as he remarks in one of his disquisitions on the relation of skill and chance, “the lady who was my partner in this game is now my partner for life.” He was destined to end his busy life lamentably, far from Kew, when, having in latter days married an American lady, he transplanted his household gods across the Atlantic. In passing through New York from the South, he had an attack of fever, mistaken, it seems, for the terrible “Yellow Jack” that from time to time scares Uncle Sam, so poor Proctor was turned out of his hotel, and packed off to die in a hospital.