There is a charming group of houses standing in their own grounds still left on Campden Hill, although Campden House has been demolished and its site built over within the last few years. The property on which Campden House stood, and some authorities say the house itself, was won over some game of chance in James I.’s time by Sir Baptist Hicks, afterwards Viscount Campden, from Sir Walter Cope, the builder of Holland House, hard by. It was to Campden House that Queen Anne’s little son, the Duke of Gloucester, was taken for country air. The air is still pleasant on these heights, and the open tract of Holland Park gives so much freshness that plants flourish wonderfully. There are good gardens attached to many of the houses--Cam House, Blundell House, Aubrey House, Thornwood, Holly, and Moray Lodges, and several others. Holly Lodge is noteworthy as having for a few years been the residence of Lord Macaulay. There are some charming trees in the grounds, even yews (which are among the first to suffer from smoke) looking well; a good old mulberry and silver elms, and a camellia in a border near the wall, which often flowers out of doors, although some years the half-open buds drop off from the effects of frosty fogs. Cam House has one of the most charming gardens. It is now lived in by Sir Walter Phillimore, and has been in his family for some 150 years. It was well known as Argyll Lodge, as the late Duke bought the lease and made it his town residence from the time he first took office in Lord Aberdeen’s ministry in 1852. Before that it was known as Bedford Lodge, as the Duchess of Bedford, step-mother of Lord John Russell, the Prime Minister, had lived there and laid out and planted most of the garden. The “two very old oaks, which,” wrote the Duke of Argyll, “would have done no discredit to any ancient chase in England,” are still to be seen. The Duke was also delighted with the wild birds which there made their homes in the garden; in fact, he says in his Memoirs, it was the sight of the “fine lawn covered with starlings, hunting for grubs and insects in their very peculiar fashion,” the nut-hatches “moving over the trees, as if they were in some deep English woodland,” the fly-catchers and the warblers, that made him decide to take the house. During the half-century he lived there many of the birds, the fly catchers, reed-wren, black cap, and willow-wren, and nut-hatches, deserted the garden, but even now starlings and wood-pigeons abound, and, what is even more rare in London, squirrels may be seen swinging from branch to branch of the old trees. Besides the two old pollard oaks there are good beech and copper-beech, elder, chestnuts, snowy medlar, sycamore, several varieties of thorn, and a large Scotch laburnum, _Laburnum alpinum_, which flowers later than the ordinary laburnum, and is therefore valuable to prolong the season of these golden showers. The leaves are broader and darker, and growth more spreading.