There is a special interest attached to Kensal Green Cemetery from its having been the first, but I think it is also the worst. Mr. Loftie describes it as “the bleakest, dampest, most melancholy of all the burial-grounds of London.” I doubt if it is the dampest, though the soil is a heavy clay, for I think that the Tower Hamlets Cemetery is probably far damper. Nor is Kensal Green so overcrowded or untidy as the Tower Hamlets, where gravestones are tumbling and lying about, apparently unclaimed and uncared for, amongst dead shrubs and rank grass; it has also not quite so large a proportion of “common graves” (for eight bodies or so), as there are in some of the other grounds, and the number of burials per acre has not been quite so enormous as, for instance, at Tooting, Brompton, or Abney Park. The last-named ground, when it had only been opened fifteen years, was described in an official report as being “a mass of corruption underneath,” the soil being a “damp, blue clay.” But Kensal Green Cemetery is truly awful, with its catacombs, its huge mausoleums, family vaults, statues, broken pillars, weeping images, and oceans of tombstones, good, bad, and indifferent. I think the indifferent are to be preferred, the bad should not be anywhere, and the good are utterly out of place. It is also the largest in the metropolis, and as the Roman Catholic ground joins it there are in this spot, or there very soon will be, ninety-nine acres of dead bodies. [Illustration: THE TOMB OF PRINCESS SOPHIA.]