The Gardens at Kew “Imperial Kew,” as Darwin styles it, are the richest in the world.  They consist of one hundred and seventy acres.  They were once private gardens, and were long in the possession of Royalty, until the accession of Queen Victoria, who opened the gardens to the public and placed them under the control of the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Woods and Forests, “with a view of rendering them available to the general good.”

            She hath left you all her walks,
    Her private arbors and new planted orchards
    On this side Tiber.  She hath left them you
    And to your heirs for ever; common pleasures
    To walk abroad and recreate yourselves.

They contain a large Palm-house built in 1848.[036] The extent of glass for covering the building is said to be 360,000 square feet.  My Mahomedan readers in Hindostan, (I hope they will be numerous,) will perhaps be pleased to hear that there is an ornamental mosque in these gardens.  On each of the doors of this mosque is an Arabic inscription in golden characters, taken from the Koran.  The Arabic has been thus translated:—­

    LET THERE BE NO FORCE IN RELIGION. 
    THERE IS NO OTHER GOD EXCEPT THE DEITY. 
    MAKE NOT ANY LIKENESS UNTO GOD.

The first sentence of the translation is rather ambiguously worded.  The sentiment has even an impious air:  an apparent meaning very different from that which was intended.  Of course the original text means, though the English translator has not expressed that meaning—­“Let there be no force used in religion.”

When William Cobbett was a boy of eleven years of age he worked in the garden of the Bishop of Winchester at Farnham.  Having heard much of Kew gardens he resolved to change his locality and his master.  He started off for Kew, a distance of about thirty miles, with only thirteen pence in his pocket.  The head gardener at Kew at once engaged his services.  A few days after, George the Fourth, then Prince of Wales, saw the boy sweeping the lawns, and laughed heartily at his blue smock frock and long red knotted garters.  But the poor gardener’s boy became a public writer, whose productions were not exactly calculated to excite the merriment of princes.

Most poets have a painter’s eye for the disposition of forms and colours.  Kent’s practice as a painter no doubt helped to make him what he was as a landscape-gardener.  When an architect was consulted about laying out the grounds at Blenheim he replied, “you must send for a landscape-painter:”  he might have added—­“or a poet.”