which is unique. No English palace that still remains has borne, at least until quite our own day, so homely an air. Whitehall, Oatlands, Nonsuch are gone. Buckingham Palace, Saint James's, and Kensington have the inevitable defects of all royal dwellings in a great metropolis. Windsor Castle is a rival; but in historical association it is certainly inferior. Earlier sovereigns lived at Windsor, later monarchs since George III. have made it a home; but it has not been, like Hampton Court, for more than two centuries the almost continuous residence of the rulers of England. There Wolsey rested and gave feasts; Henry spent honeymoons; Mary sat wearily waiting for the babe that never came; Elizabeth hunted and intrigued; James talked theology; Charles collected pictures, and slipped secretly through his guards' hands; Cromwell listened to the organ as Milton played it; Charles II. made love, and William III. made gardens; and so the English rulers went on living at their ease in the most comfortable of their houses, till the day when the boy who was to be George III. had his ears boxed by his grandfather, and vowed he would never live in the place where he had received such an indignity.
Hampton Court possesses in a striking degree the interest of a continuous connection with English history and an association with the domestic lives of English sovereigns. With these two thoughts in mind it is that we pass through its courts and examine its architectural features. Each bit of build-
