"It seems to the writer of this history that the inhabitants of London are scarcely sufficiently sensible of the beauty of its environs.... With the exception of Constantinople, there is no city in the world that can for a moment enter into competition with it. For himself, though in his time something of a rambler, he is not ashamed in this respect to confess to a legitimate Cockney taste; and for his part he does not know where life can flow on more pleasantly than in sight of Kensington Gardens, viewing the silver Thames winding by the bowers of Rosebank, or inhaling from its terraces the refined air of graceful Richmond. In exactly ten minutes it is in the power of every man to free himself from all the tumult of the world and find himself in a sublime sylvan solitude superior to the Cedars of Lebanon and inferior only in extent to the chestnut forests of Anatolia." The judicious critic will have little difficulty in assigning this vivid passage to the too-graphic pen of Lord Beaconsfield; but he will also recognize the fact that a description written in 1837 needs some modification when applied to 1906. The central solitude of London--Kensington Gardens--is still very much as it was. Just now, its dark foliage and dusky glades suggest all the romantic associations of Gustave Doré's forests, with a tall trooper of the Life Guards and a bashful nursery-maid, for a Red Cross Knight and an Enchanted Princess. If we go further afield and climb the uplands of Highgate and Hampstead, we look down upon a boundless and beautiful city dimly visible through a golden haze. But the difference between the environs of London now and the same environs when Lord Beaconsfield described them is that they are now united to the centre by an unbroken network of gaslit streets. The enormous increase in the population of London, which every year brings with it, fills up the gaps and spaces, and the metropolis is now a solid whole, with its circumference extending further and further every day into what a year ago was country. In other words, the suburbs are getting further off, and what are suburbs to-day will be town to-morrow; but still there are suburbs, and a Sunday spent in them is an interesting experience.