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 trace