Formerly, the pleasaunces at Kew abounded in the absurd anachronisms which, in the days of our great-grandfathers, were supposed to enhance the beauties of a garden--sham ruins, stucco temples, and the like. There was even a Merlin's cave; perhaps, at times, a magician also was on view. These monstrosities have, happily, for the most part, crumbled away, or have been more promptly destroyed; fragments of them have gone to build the rockeries, and served thus some useful purpose in a district where stone is far to find. The Chinese pagoda almost alone survives, conspicuous owing to its height from many points in all the country round, and of this all that we can say is that it is a pagoda upon whose architectural merits we must leave the Chinese to pass a judgment--remarking, meanwhile, that it harms the landscape no more than a water-tower, and considerably less than a factory chimney. Gliding along the river, past the enclosing wall of the palace, we are confronted on the opposite shore by the houses of Brentford. These we will leave for a moment to finish our say concerning Kew, whose handsome many-arched bridge of grey stone, not unlike that of Richmond, is now coming into view. This bridge was built about the year 1783, replacing an earlier structure. A short distance from it on the Surrey shore, abutting on to one side of the gardens, in the immediate vicinity of the royal palace, is the more ancient part of the village of Kew. Here is the Green, so pleasant a feature in many of these suburban townlets. On one side stands the church, with its little graveyard--the "Chapel of St. Anne," and once a true Queen Anne structure, for the ground was granted by that sovereign, and the church completed in the year 1714. It has, however, undergone many alterations, especially about the year 1838, when it was enlarged at the expense of King William IV., and another "restoration" has lately been completed, during which a chancel has been appended, and the roof of the nave raised. At the same time a mortuary chapel was added, in which is laid the body of the late Duke of Cambridge. He died at Cambridge Cottage, an unpretending mansion looking on to the Green, which remained the property of his widow until her death in 1889. Other persons of note in their day rest in this little God's acre. Aiton, the gardener; Bauer, the microscopist; Kirby, the architect; Meyer and Zoffany, the artists; and, greater far than they, Gainsborough, whom to name is enough, was, by his own desire, buried under a plain tomb in Kew Churchyard. Here also is buried Sir William Hooker, late director of Kew Gardens, to whose repute as a botanist must be added that of developing the resources of the institution, and by his influence obtaining from successive governments the means of founding a great national museum of botany. He was succeeded by his son, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, the present director, by whom the work thus inaugurated has been no less ably carried on.