These be tales of eld, and now Turnham Green is, to all intents and purposes, London, and shops have long been built where the school stood, and that dark high road—upon whose infrequent pedestrians, certain schoolboys, packed off to bed all too early, and not in the least tired, were used to expend all the available soap and other handy missiles, from lofty windows—has become a highway even more than a thought too brilliantly lit at night. [Illustration: CHISWICK CHURCH.] What remains of the park and gardens around Chiswick House now looks sorry enough. The place came into the hands of the Dukes of Devonshire in 1753, when William Cavendish, the fourth duke, who had married the daughter and heiress of the third and last Earl of Burlington, succeeded on that nobleman’s death. It was this Earl of Burlington who had created the glories of Chiswick. A princely patron of the arts, especially those of architecture and sculpture, he had brought home with him from his travels in Italy a taste for the grand exotic manner in the building of mansions and the planning of gardens; and built the house here in 1729, after the Palladian model. It has been somewhat altered since, but the general idea remains, and sufficiently proves that the grand manner, learned abroad under summer skies, is not the comfortable manner as evolved by the necessities of a less ardent clime. English architects have been slow to unlearn the classic fallacy, but the home-grown architecture wins in the end, not from any appreciation of the artistic merits or demerits of the many methods, but on the score of sheer comfort or discomfort in living. The gardens of Chiswick House abounded in formal walks and long vistas, with conventional “ruins” and groups of antique statuary, but most of these are now gone. Chiswick House, deserted by its owners, became a lunatic asylum, and stands at last more than a little forlorn, with new streets and roads everywhere around its grounds, and a newer suburb with the projected name of “Burlington” arising by piece-meal, instead of being created _ad hoc_, as the intention originally was. Burlington is an excellent name; substantial people, with good bank balances should surely reside at such. It radiates respectability; no one could be ashamed of it. I can easily imagine confiding tradesfolk giving unlimited credit to residents at Burlington; but it has not yet come into being, and the vast wilderness-like expanse of Duke’s Meadows, projecting far southward, like a great cape between two bends of the river, remains a tussocky place of desolation, looking over to Mortlake. In Burlington Lane, which is an old name, is a new length of villas, “The Cresent,” its name so misspelled, and kept so with the valiance of ignorance, uncorrected, for at least five years past.