Strange to say, though Hammersmith has all but lost in the rush and hurry of the present the impress of the past, its neighbour Chiswick has to a great extent retained its old-fashioned character. True, it has lost many of its ancient mansions, such as Chiswick Hall, long a favourite summer residence of the masters of Westminster School, and the quaint Red Lion Inn with the whetstone chained to the lintel of the door, beloved of artists {272} and poets, has been improved away; but fortunately the house in which Hogarth lived for some years and died has been preserved, and Chiswick House, long the seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, now a private lunatic asylum, is still much what it was more than a century ago. The venerable cedar-trees and antique statues in its grounds, with the noble entrance gateway designed in 1625 by Inigo Jones for Beaufort House, and given by Sir Hans Sloane to the owner of the estate in 1738, preserve to it even at this late day something of a classic and aristocratic character. Built between 1730 and 1736, on the site of an earlier Jacobean mansion, by the last Earl of Burlington, who enjoyed some little reputation as an architect during his lifetime, Chiswick House was greatly enlarged by his successor, who was fond of holding open-air fêtes in its gardens, which were almost as celebrated as those at Kew, and were for some years under the care of the distinguished botanist, Sir Joseph Paxton; but the mansion itself is now chiefly celebrated for the fact that in it the two great statesmen, Charles James Fox and George Canning, passed away, strange to say, in the same room, the former in 1806 the latter in 1827. [Illustration: STRAND ON THE GREEN WITH KEW BRIDGE]