not a sacrilegious act, and it is out of the picture. For this country is the creation of the ages of Denham and Pope and George the Fourth, who probably did not read Shelley. The plantation of the two miles of elms in the Long Walk was begun under Charles II in 1680, and these are far more impressive than the oaks at Swinley, which remind the imaginative of Alfred and the Confessor. The straight lines of this Walk and of Queen Anne's ride dominate the Park. At Cranbourne the significant fact is not that William the Conqueror's Oak is in the White Deer Enclosure, but that the racehorse "Eclipse" was born here in 1764. The Bray Wood oak trees that sprouted in the Middle Ages were suddenly modernized by being named after Queen Anne and Queen Charlotte.

THE LOWER WARD, WINDSOR CASTLE

When Hazlitt went to see the pictures at Windsor, he said: "Pope's lines on Windsor Forest suggest themselves to the mind and make the air about it delicate". It looks a little odd to attribute to such a poem the effect of making the air delicate—Banquo having observed to Duncan that where the martlets "most breed and haunt ... the air is delicate". Yet it has a truth. The delicacy is sophisticated; it is the delicacy of three—not to say nine—centuries of artifice, or of Nature hand in hand with Sir Christopher Wren, Grinling Gibbons, Antonio Verrio, Alexander Pope, Esquire, and the great gardeners. This artifice is triumphant on the East Terrace of the Castle itself, the smooth walk half a mile long, the orangery, the dark and bright symmetrical Italian garden, with its marble and bronze statuary and its elephants and nymphs, seen from the white-and-gold royal dining-room. It is strong on the smooth sculptured turf below the Round Tower and the rose garden in the ditch, though quaintly alleviated by the gorse above that; still strong in the avenues of great elms in the Home Park, the lime trees, the grass, as smooth as a lake and untrodden save by birds, under the Castle hill and the high rookery trees. If you escape it among the bracken and the warty oaks of the Great Park, it is suddenly upon you with violence when you look up at Snow Hill and see the colossal copper statue of Farmer George on horseback, more magnificent and less amiable now than in life. It is more than perfect—it is rampant and even, so far as is consistent with its formality, rollicking—at Virginia Water, the largest artificial water in England, completed under George III, with its laced waterfall, its ruined columns brought from Tripoli by George IV, its marble altar dedicated to Jupiter Helios; the dark yews, close by, and the cedars and stone pines of Belvidere Wood; the heronry, and the Fishing Cottage which imperfectly replaces a Fishing Temple in the Chinese style. If Pope's "Windsor Forest" has become obscure in the night of two hundred years, Virginia Water speaks in an unquestionable and still flourishing style.

The Castle itself, that sublime cloud upon the western horizon, if it is approached more nearly, is not what it seems when, from a road or river far to the west, it is fit to embody our fancies of that fairest castle that man ever saw, in the dream of Maxen; or from the fields of Datchet; or from the railway arch over the Clewer footpath, which gives a view of smooth water gleaming between old walls, with swans, placid masts and curled pennons, and to the left Eton Chapel and its high dark windows among poplars and serrated roofs in a sky of grey satin, and to the right the closely gathered huge bulk of the Castle above the small town.

As you walk under the Curfew Tower, the Garter Tower, the Salisbury Tower, in Thames Street, only the mass and outline announce antiquity; the streets, the names over the shops, even the old man who has dyed his white beard to get work as a scaffolder, look more ancient. Doubtless the jackdaws, gliding straight out into the clear air from the Round Tower, have been there since Creçy, but the stonework is new. That also is the work of George IV. Except St. George's Chapel, the timber and herring-boned brick of the Horse-shoe Cloister, and the stone houses of the Military Knights where men obviously live, and the tranquil and leafy Canons' Cloister at the top of the Hundred Steps, most of the exterior of Windsor looks and is new. There is little foliage on the walls, very little moss and green mould, and small space given to the festoons of the bellflower, which contrives its ivy-shaped humid leaves out of the driest stone. The thrush sings with a clear, wild note that seems scarcely earned by the barren hard walls. Even if searched for, ancient buildings are not numerous or easy to find. Part of the lower story eastward from the Devil's Tower, and some foundations, are of Henry II's time. From Henry III's more survives—the outer wall on the west and its three towers, the wall of the South Ambulatory in the Dean's Cloister, a door behind the altar of the chapel, the remains of the Domum Regis on the north of the chapel in one of the Canons' houses, and the King's Hall, now a library. The work of Edward III and William of Wykeham gives its form to the Castle as a whole. Of Edward IV's work St. George's Chapel and the Horse-shoe Cloisters remain. St. George's Chapel is the finest and most perfect survival from the Castle as it was at the end of the middle ages. Ruskin called it "a very visible piece of romance". It is exquisite and elaborate. It holds and embalms the sunlight. It might be called hard, and the nave and aisles are at first sight a little cold on account of the lack of history, except for the mildly pathetic monument to George V of Hanover. But the choir, with its pomp of banners, the swords, helmets, mantels, and arms of the Garter Knights, is of an incomparable sombre gorgeousness. The groined vault of the nave of St. George's Chapel, and the Tudor buildings on the north side, and the south and east walls of the Tomb House, are Henry VII's; the groined vault of the choir at St. George's, and the entrance gateway, are Henry VIII's. The gallery and façade, with the postern at the west end of the North Terrace, are Elizabethan.

THE HORSE-SHOE CLOISTERS AND ST. GEORGE'S CHAPEL

The furniture and decorations of the Castle are splendid and costly, but not of great age. The collection of pictures is as large but not as well displayed as if it were a public gallery. The tapestries are more suitable to a residence, if less pleasing in themselves; they belong to the last two centuries. Grinling Gibbons' life-like carvings of fish, fowl, and fruit are extraordinarily appropriate here. We miss Lely's portraits of the beauties of the Restoration, which have gone to Hampton Court; for they belong to the last period when the Castle was thoroughly alive, royally and humanly. None of the furniture and household effects mentioned in an inventory of 1547 is left. There is no Elizabethan or true Jacobean work, because the furniture was continually renewed and kept up-to-date in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nothing has come down from the time of Cromwell's occupation, but much of Charles II's, William and Mary's, Anne's, and George IV's. George IV was also the first considerable collector of ancient arms at Windsor. The armoury is the Prince Consort's. Neither Henry V's "harnois de teste" worn at Agincourt, nor the white armour of Joan of Arc, said to have been sent to Henry VI, is anywhere to be seen.

It was probably the greatest work