Hampton Court I saw in the gloom, and rain, and my chief recollections are of the magnificent yew-trees beneath whose shelter—­the work of ages—­I took refuge from the pelting shower.  The expectations cherished from childhood about the Cartoons were all baffled; there was no light by which they could be seen.  But I must hope to visit Hampton Court again in the time of roses.

The Zooelogical Gardens are another pleasure of the million, since, although something is paid there, it is so little that almost all can afford it.  To me, it is a vast pleasure to see animals where they can show out their habits or instincts, and to see them assembled from, all climates and countries, amid verdure and with room enough, as they are here, is a true poem.  They have a fine lion, the first I ever saw that realized the idea we have of the king of the animal world; but the groan and roar of this one were equally royal.  The eagles were fine, but rather disgraced themselves.  It is a trait of English piety, which would, no doubt, find its defenders among ourselves, not to feed the animals on Sunday, that their keepers may have rest; at least this was the explanation given us by one of these men of the state of ravenous hunger in which we found them on the Monday.  I half hope he was jesting with us.  Certain it is that the eagles were wild with famine, and even the grandest of them, who had eyed us at first as if we were not fit to live in the same zone with him, when the meat came round, after a short struggle to maintain his dignity, joined in wild shriek and scramble with the rest.

Sir John Soane’s Museum I visited, containing the sarcophagus described by Dr. Waagen, Hogarth’s pictures, a fine Canaletto, and a manuscript of Tasso.  It fills the house once the residence of his body, still of his mind.  It is not a mind with which I have sympathy; I found there no law of harmony, and it annoyed me to see things all jumbled together as if in an old curiosity-shop.  Nevertheless it was a generous bequest, and much may perhaps be found there of value to him who takes time to seek.

The Gardens at Kew delighted me, thereabouts all was so green, and still one could indulge at leisure in the humorous and fantastic associations that cluster around the name of Kew, like the curls of a “big wig” round the serene and sleepy face of its wearer.  Here are fourteen green-houses:  in one you find all the palms; in another, the productions of the regions of snow; in another, those squibs and humorsome utterances of Nature, the cactuses,—­ay! there I saw the great-grandfather of all the cactuses, a hoary, solemn plant, declared to be a thousand years old, disdaining to say if it is not really much, older; in yet another, the most exquisitely minute plants, delicate as the tracery of frostwork, too delicate for the bowers of fairies, such at least as visit the gross brains of earthly poets.