In vain we are told that Wren is supposed to have built the south front, and Kent (a man famous in his time) the east front. We can no more get up any enthusiasm about it as a building, than if it were a box or a piece of cheese. But it possesses a Dutch solidity; it can be imagined full of English comfort; it is quiet; in a good air; and, though it is a palace, no tragical history is connected with it: all which considerations give it a sort of homely, fireside character, which seems to represent the domestic side of royalty itself, and thus renders an interesting service to what is not always so well recommended by cost and splendour. Windsor Castle is a place to receive monarchs in; Buckingham Palace to see fashion in; Kensington Palace seems a place to drink tea in: and this is by no means a state of things in which the idea of royalty comes least home to the good wishes of its subjects. The reigns that flourished here, appositely enough to this notion of the building, were all tea-drinking reigns--at least on the part of the ladies; and if the present Queen does not reign there, she was born and bred there, growing up quietly under the care of a domestic mother; during which time, the pedestrian, as he now goes quietly along the gardens, fancies no harsher sound to have been heard from the Palace windows than the "tuning of the tea-things," or the sound of a pianoforte. [Sidenote: KENSINGTON PALACE.] The associations of Kensington Palace are almost entirely with the earlier Hanoverian reigns; the later Georges neglected it. Rumour hath it that this royal domain originated in the establishment of a nursery for the children of Henry VIII. If it were so, Elizabeth and Victoria must have been brought up on the same spot; but the tradition is not well supported. Its first ascertained proprietor was Heneage Finch, Speaker of the House of Commons at the accession of the First Charles, who built and occupied only a small nucleus of the present structure, which was enlarged from time to time by most of its successive occupants, but with no pretension, and without much plan. From the second Earl of Nottingham, the grandson of Finch, William III. bought the house and grounds. The latter he enlarged to the extent of twenty-six acres. To these Anne added thirty, and to these in turn Queen Caroline, wife of George II., added three hundred. The house had been the while proportionately growing. Its last expansion was contributed by the Duke of Sussex.