Historically, as I retrospectively perceived, it never ceases to be most intimately interesting down to the day of that third George who had his ears boxed there. The second James had almost as little to do with it as our last king; he was in such haste to go wrong everywhere else that he had no time for the place where other sovereigns before and after him took their pleasure. But William and Mary seemed to give it most of their leisure; to the great little Dutchman it was almost as dear as if it were a bit of Holland, and even more to his mind than Kensington. His queen planted it and kept it to his fancy while he was away fighting the Stuarts in Ireland; and when she was dead, he continued to pull down and build up at Hampton Court as long as he lived, laying the sort of ruthless hand upon its antiquity with which the unsparing present always touches the past. He sickened towards his end there, and one day his horse stepping into a mole-hill when the king was hunting (in the park where the kings from Henry VIII. down had chased the deer), fell with him and hurt him past surgery; but it was at Kensington that he shortly afterwards died. Few indeed, if any of the royal dwellers at Hampton Court breathed their last in air supposed so life-giving by Wolsey when he made it his seat. They loved it and enjoyed it, and in Queen Anne's time, when under a dull sovereign the civility of England brightened to Augustan splendor, the deep-rooted stem of English poetry burst there into the most exquisite artificial flower which it ever bore; for it was at Hampton Court that the fact occurred, which the fancy of the poet fanned to a bloom, as lasting as if it were rouge, in the matchless numbers of _The Rape of the Lock_. Such pleasure-parties as that in which the lovely Arabella Fermor lost her curl under the scissors of Lord Petre, must have had the best of the gayety, in the time of the first and second Georges, for Pope himself, writing of it in one of his visits in 1717, described the court life as one of dull and laborious etiquette. Yet what was fairest and brightest and wittiest, if not wisest in England graced it, and the names of Bellenden and Lepell and Montagu, of Harvey and Chesterfield, of Gay and Pope and Walpole, flash and fade through the air that must have been so heavy even at Hampton Court in these reigns. After all, it is the common people who get the best of it when some lordly pleasure-house for which they have paid comes back to them, as palaces are not unapt finally to do; and it is not unimaginable that collectively they bring as much brilliancy and beauty to its free enjoyment as the kings and courtiers did in their mutually hampered pleasures.