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- 
