My English friends apologize for the wretchedness of the collection, its rows of indifferent portraits and its multitude of feeble imitations in historical and landscape painting, by saying that the more eminent artists are preparing themselves to paint the walls and ceilings of the new Houses of Parliament in fresco.  The pinnacles and turrets of that vast and magnificent structure, built of a cream-colored stone, and florid with Gothic tracery, copied from the ancient chapel of St. Stephen, the greater part of which was not long ago destroyed by fire, are rising from day to day above the city roofs.  We walked through its broad and long passages and looked into its unfinished halls, swarming with stone-cutters and masons, and thought that if half of them were to be painted in fresco, the best artists of England have the work of years before them.

With the exhibition of drawings in water-colors, which is a separate affair from the paintings in oil, I was much better pleased.  The late improvement in this branch of art, is, I believe, entirely due to English artists.  They have given to their drawings of this class a richness, a force of effect, a depth of shadow and strength of light, and a truth of representation which astonishes those who are accustomed only to the meagreness and tenuity of the old manner.  I have hardly seen any landscapes which exceeded, in the perfectness of the illusion, one or two which I saw in the collection I visited, and I could hardly persuade myself that a flower-piece on which I looked, representing a bunch of hollyhocks, was not the real thing after all, so crisp were the leaves, so juicy the stalks, and with such skillful relief was flower heaped upon flower and leaf upon leaf.

Letter XXI

The Parks of London.—­The Police.

London, June 24, 1845.

Nothing can be more striking to one who is accustomed to the little inclosures called public parks in our American cities, than the spacious, open grounds of London.  I doubt, in fact, whether any person fully comprehends their extent, from any of the ordinary descriptions of them, until he has seen them or tried to walk over them.  You begin at the east end of St. James’s Park, and proceed along its graveled walks, and its colonnades of old trees, among its thickets of ornamental shrubs carefully inclosed, its grass-plots maintained in perpetual freshness and verdure by the moist climate and the ever-dropping skies, its artificial sheets of water covered with aquatic birds of the most beautiful species, until you begin almost to wonder whether the park has a western extremity.  You reach it at last, and proceed between the green fields of Constitution Hill, when you find yourself at the corner of Hyde Park, a much more spacious pleasure-ground.  You proceed westward in Hyde Park until you are weary, when you find yourself on the verge of Kensington Gardens, a