78 LONDON PARKS <^ GARDENS 



When Duke Humphrey's Walk in St. Paul's was 

 burnt the name became attached to the walk in St. 

 James's Park, where idlers also sauntered. Some writers 

 attribute the transference of the name to the fact that 

 the arched walk under the trees was like the cathedral 

 aisle. Anyhow the name clung to this walk in the Park 

 from 1666 and during the eighteenth century. 



When Carlton House became the centre of attraction 

 the Park itself was in a very neglected state. The canal 

 was turbid, the grass long, and the seats unpainted. 

 How long it would have remained in this condition is 

 uncertain had not a new impulse of gardening possessed 

 the whole nation, and once more it was resolved to alter 

 the entire Park. 



The rage for landscape gardening was at its height. 

 Capability Brown had done his work of destruction, and 

 set the fashion of " copying nature," and his successors 

 were following on his lines, but going much further even 

 than Brown. The sight of a straight canal had become 

 intolerable. The Serpentine was designed when the idea 

 that it might be possible to make the banks of artificial 

 sheets of water in anything but a perfectly straight line 

 was just dawning, but the canal in St. James's Park was 

 transformed when half the stiff ponds and canals in the 

 kingdom had been twisted and turned into lakes or 

 meres. Brown had had a hand in the alterations at the 

 time Rosamund's Pond was removed, but it was Eyton 

 who planned and executed the work fifty years later. It 

 was begun in 1827, and a contemporary writer praises 

 the result as " the best obliteration of avenues " that 

 has been effected. Although he owns it involved " a 

 tremendous destruction of fine elms," he is lost in 

 admiration of the "astounding ingenuity" which "con- 



