Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 097, January, 1876Various
Science
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 097, January, 1876
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
Crossing the Kingston road, which runs across the peninsula and skirts
the northern boundary of Hampton Park, we get into its continuation,
Bushy Park. This is larger than the chief enclosure, but less
pretentious. We cease to be oppressed by the palace and its excess of
the artificial. The great avenues of horse-chestnut, five in number,
and running parallel with a length of rather more than a mile and an
aggregate breadth of nearly two hundred yards, are formal enough in
design, but the mass of foliage gives them the effect of a wood. They
lead nowhere in particular, and are flanked by glades and copses in
which the genuinely rural prevails. Cottages gleam through the trees.
The lowing of kine, the tinkling of the sheep-bell, the gabble
of poultry, lead you away from thoughts of prince and city. Deer
domesticated here since long before the introduction of the turkey
or the guinea-hen bear themselves with as quiet ease and freedom
from fear as though they were the lords of the manor and held the
black-letter title-deeds for the delicious stretch of sward over
which they troop. Less stately, but scarce more shy, indigenes are
the hares, lineal descendants of those which gave sport to Oliver
Cromwell. When that grim Puritan succeeded to the lordship of the
saintly cardinal, he was fain, when the Dutch, Scotch and Irish
indulged him with a brief chance to doff his buff coat, to take
relaxation in coursing. We loiter by the margin of the ponds he dug
in the hare-warren, and which were presented as nuisances by the grand
jury in 1662. The complaint was that by turning the water of the "New
River" into them the said Oliver had made the road from Hampton Wick
boggy and unsafe. Another misdemeanor of the deceased was at the same
time and in like manner denounced. This was the stopping up of the
pathway through the warren. The palings were abated, and the path is
open to all nineteenth-century comers, as it probably will be to those
of the twentieth, this being a land of precedent, averse to change.
We may stride triumphantly across the location of the Cromwellian
barricades, and not the less so, perhaps, for certain other barricades
which he helped to erect in the path of privilege.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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