146 KEW GARDENS 



of the first night of She Stoops to Conquer, and 

 the first fame of the Vicar of WakefieM. 



About the same time as Mrs. Gwyn, died 

 Francis Bauer, a half-century resident at Kew, 

 brought there by Sir Joseph Banks to exercise his 

 remarkable skill as a natural history draughtsman. 

 At the end of the eighteenth century lie had 

 brought out a volume of delineations of the 

 exotic plants in the Gardens ; and many of his 

 plates lie still unpublished at South Kensington. 

 It is said that in 1827 he laid before the Royal 

 Society a paper by J. N. de Niepce, another 

 foreigner living at Kew, who sought in vain to 

 draw attention to some such process as was after- 

 wards developed by Daguerre, so that Kew may 

 claim to be a cradle of photography. While 

 we are on the head of art, Hofland the painter 

 should be mentioned as having been brought up 

 at Kew ; also his wife, the once popular novelist 

 Barbara Hofland, who wrote a book about 

 the Richmond neighbourhood, sumptuously 

 illustrated in the style of its day (1832), with 

 much the same aim as the present volume, but 

 containing a larger proportion of fine words to a 

 smaller stock of matter. 



We now approach our own time, in which 



