of village green or central square, with a church in the middle, and a site for a market and barracks. White’s views were more like Nash’s in some respects, as he had artificial water and a drive round the Park. The lease held by the Duke of Portland fell in, in 1811, and soon after the work of carrying out Nash’s design was begun by James Morgan. The Regent’s Park Canal was included in the same plan, and begun in 1812 and finished in 1820. Its length from Paddington to Limehouse is 8¾ miles, and the total fall 84 feet. [Illustration: AUTUMN IN REGENT’S PARK] Although the planting and levelling began in 1812, the buildings rose up slowly. Of the villas in the Park only two were built in 1820, the rent demanded for the ground being extremely high. But two or three years later the whole thing was more or less as it is now, so far as the general outline and buildings are concerned. The cost by May 1826 was £1,533,582, and the estimated probable revenue £36,330. The Prince Regent took the greatest interest in the proceedings, and Nash’s design included a site for a palace for him, though even contemporary writers condemned the suggestion, as the situation was damp--“the soil was clay, ... and the view bad.” It was only natural that the Park should henceforth become the Regent’s, and not Marylebone Park, and the “new street” to connect it with Carlton House be called Regent Street. It is difficult to judge Regent’s Park with an unprejudiced eye. The exaggerated praise it called forth when just completed is only equalled by the unmeasured censure of the next generation. Of the houses which surround it the following are two descriptions. The first, in 1855, calls them “highly-embellished terraces of houses, in which the Doric and Ionic, the Corinthian, and even the Tuscan orders have been employed with ornate effect, aided by architectural sculpture.” Fifty years later the same houses are summed up with very different epithets: “Most of the ugly terraces which surround it exhibit all the worst follies of the Grecian architectural mania which disgraced the beginning of this century”! It may not be a style which commends itself to modern taste, but one thing is certain, that having embarked on classical architecture it was best to stick to it and complete the whole. It is as much a bit of history, and as typical of the age, as Elizabethan or Tudor architecture is of theirs, and as such it is best to treat Regent’s Park as an interesting example of early nineteenth-century taste.