convert that ancient park into a palace garden. 'She asked my father,'
Horace Walpole relates, 'what the alteration might possibly
cost?'--_Only three crowns_' was the civil, witty, candid answer. The
queen was wise enough to take the hint. It is possible she meant to
convert the park into gardens that should be open to the public as at
Berlin, Mannheim, and even the Tuileries. Still it would not have been
ours.

Horace Walpole owed, perhaps, his love of architecture and his taste for
gardening, partly to the early companionship of Gray, who delighted in
those pursuits. Walpole's estimation of pictures, medals, and statues,
was however the fruit of a long residence abroad. We are apt to rail at
continental nations; yet had it not been for the occasional intercourse
with foreign nations, art would have altogether died out among us. To
the 'Grandes Tours,' performed as a matter of course by our young
nobility in the most impressionable period of their lives we owe most of
our noble private collections. Charles I. and Buckingham, renewed, in
their travels in Spain, the efforts previously made by Lord Arundel and
Lord Pembroke, to embellish their country seats. Then came the
Rebellion; and like a mighty rushing river, made a chasm in which much
perished. Art languished in the reign of the second Charles, excepting
in what related to portrait painting. Evelyn stood almost alone in his
then secluded and lovely retirement at Wotton; apart in his undying
exertions still to arrest the Muses ere they quitted for ever English
shores. Then came the deadly frost of William's icy influence. The reign
of Anne was conspicuous more for letters than for art: architecture,
more especially, was vulgarized under Vanbrugh. George I. had no
conception of anything abstract: taste, erudition, science, art, were
like a dead language to his common sense, his vulgar profligacy, and his
personal predilections. Neither George II. nor his queen had an iota of