The finest of the water-works at Chatsworth is one called the Emperor Fountain which throws up a jet 267 feet high.  This height exceeds that of any fountain in Europe.  There is a vast Conservatory on the estate, built of glass by Sir Joseph Paxton, who designed and constructed the Crystal Palace.  His experience in the building of conservatories no doubt suggested to him the idea of the splendid glass edifice in Hyde Park.  The conservatory at Chatsworth required 70,000 square feet of glass.  Four miles of iron tubing are used in heating the building.  There is a broad carriage way running right through the centre of the conservatory.[033] This conservatory is peculiarly rich in exotic plants of all kinds, collected at an enormous cost.  This most princely estate, contrasted with the little cottages and cottage-gardens in the neighbourhood, suggested to Wordsworth the following sonnet.

CHATSWORTH.

    Chatsworth! thy stately mansion, and the pride
    Of thy domain, strange contrast do present
    To house and home in many a craggy tent
    Of the wild Peak, where new born waters glide
    Through fields whose thrifty occupants abide
    As in a dear and chosen banishment
    With every semblance of entire content;
    So kind is simple Nature, fairly tried! 
    Yet he whose heart in childhood gave his troth
    To pastoral dales, then set with modest farms,
    May learn, if judgment strengthen with his growth,
    That not for Fancy only, pomp hath charms;
    And, strenuous to protect from lawless harms
    The extremes of favored life, may honour both.

The two noblest of modern public gardens in England are those at Kensington and Kew.  Kensington Gardens were begun by King William the III, but were originally only twenty-six acres in extent.  Queen Anne added thirty acres more.  The grounds were laid out by the well-known garden-designers, London and Wise.[034] Queen Caroline, who formed the Serpentine River by connecting several detached pieces of water into one, and set the example of a picturesque deviation from the straight line,[035] added from Hyde Park no less than three hundred acres which were laid out by Bridgeman.  This was a great boon to the Londoners.  Horace Walpole says that Queen Caroline at first proposed to shut up St. James’s Park and convert it into a private garden for herself, but when she asked Sir Robert Walpole what it would cost, he answered—­“Only three Crowns.”  This changed her intentions.

The reader of Pope will remember an allusion to the famous Ring in Hyde Park.  The fair Belinda was sometimes attended there by her guardian Sylphs: 

    The light militia of the lower sky.

They guarded her from ‘the white-gloved beaux,’

    These though unseen are ever on the wing,
    Hang o’er the box, and hover o’er the Ring.

It was here that the gallantries of the “Merry Monarch” were but too often exhibited to his people.  “After dinner,” says the right garrulous Pepys in his journal, “to Hyde Parke; at the Parke was the King, and in another Coach, Lady Castlemaine, they greeting one another at every turn.”