The things I had chiefly in mind from my former visit were the beauties of the Stuarts' time, and of Sir Peter Lely's pencil, in the galleries of the palace, and the secular grape-vine which I found in its familiar place in a corner of the conservatories. I will not say which I paid my devoirs to first, but if it was the vine, I can truly declare that I did not find it looking a day older since I had seen it last in 1882. It could hardly have said as much for me, but I reflected that I had not been two hundred years old to begin with, and consoled myself as I could in my consciousness that I was really not so young by twenty odd years as I once was. Yet I think it must be a dull and churlish nature which would wish to refuse the gentle contemporaneity offered by the unaging antiquity at Hampton Court. I should at this moment be glad to share the youthful spirit of the sunken garden which I passed on my way to the famous vine, and in which with certain shapes of sculpture and blossom, I admired the cockerels snipped out of arbor-vitae in the taste of a world more childlike than ours, and at the same time so much older. The Dutch taste of it all, once removed from a French taste, or twice from the Italian, and mostly naturalized to the English air by the good William and Mary (who were perhaps chiefly good in comparison with all their predecessors from Henry VIII. down to the second and worst of the Jameses), comes to its most endearing expression in that long arbor of clipped wych-elms, near the sunken garden, called Mary's bower, which, on our April afternoon, was woolly with the first effort of its boughs to break into leaf.