My English friends apologize for the wretchedness of the collection, its rows of indifferent portraits and its multitude of feeble imitations in historical and landscape painting, by saying that the more eminent artists are preparing themselves to paint the walls and ceilings of the new Houses of Parliament in fresco. The pinnacles and turrets of that vast and magnificent structure, built of a cream-colored stone, and florid with Gothic tracery, copied from the ancient chapel of St. Stephen, the greater part of which was not long ago destroyed by fire, are rising from day to day above the city roofs. We walked through its broad and long passages and looked into its unfinished halls, swarming with stone-cutters and masons, and thought that if half of them were to be painted in fresco, the best artists of England have the work of years before them. With the exhibition of drawings in water-colors, which is a separate affair from the paintings in oil, I was much better pleased. The late improvement in this branch of art, is, I believe, entirely due to English artists. They have given to their drawings of this class a richness, a force of effect, a depth of shadow and strength of light, and a truth of representation which astonishes those who are accustomed only to the meagreness and tenuity of the old manner. I have hardly seen any landscapes which exceeded, in the perfectness of the illusion, one or two which I saw in the collection I visited, and I could hardly persuade myself that a flower-piece on which I looked, representing a bunch of hollyhocks, was not the real thing after all, so crisp were the leaves, so juicy the stalks, and with such skillful relief was flower heaped upon flower and leaf upon leaf. Letter XXI The Parks of London.—The Police. London, _June_ 24, 1845.