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restored too?" "Yes, my lord," was the reply. "I am not so nice as your lordship. I like my fat Venus better than anything you have given me instead of her." To which, if there were more than one rejoinder, there was none expedient to a politic Court official. Eventually, with much difficulty, the pictures were reinstated; and the "monstrous Venus" still figures, in Dodsley and the other authorities, as one of the glories of the Great Drawing Room. It is also permissible to regard it as identical with the Venus and Cupid which at present hangs in the Prince of Wales's Drawing Room at Hampton, and is supposed to be a copy of Michelangelo by his imitator, Bronzino.

This incident of the Venus occurred in 1735, when King George II. had been eight years King of England. In 1737 Queen Caroline, that astute and devoted helpmate who ruled her lord by professing to be ruled by him, died at St. James's; and for nearly twenty-three years more her husband continued to reign, bereaved but not inconsolable. No one can possibly contend that his Majesty was a very worshipful sovereign, even if we admit that he was abler than his father; that he was not ill-educated; that he had some good instincts, and that he spoke English correctly, though "with a bluff Westphalian accent." In a frigid, constrained way he was was well bred, and he had the minor virtues of method and punctuality. Avarice seems to have been his ruling passion. Whether he was bad-hearted at bottom, whether he was really brave-are still open questions. "Il est fou," said his father, who hated him, “mais il est honnête homme." This is Hervey's version, but in Horace Walpole's Reminiscences, the word is “fougueux” and whether the second syllable was omitted by the one or added by the other, is a further matter of debate. For the rest, King George was selfish, self-satisfied, unsympathetic and uninteresting. It may be that he would have appeared to greater advantage in the never-published Memoirs of Bolingbroke and Carteret; but it is unlikely. He himself did not expect laudation from either quarter. The foregoing characteristics are mainly derived from Chesterfield, who painted him after "a forty years' sitting;" and who, though his Royal Master dubbed him "a little tea-table scoundrel," and a "dwarf-baboon " dwarf-baboon" (terms which indicate gifts of vituperation not hitherto scheduled) was nevertheless a keen, and truthful artist. These things being so, it is needless here to

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lard the lean record of his private life, dignified or undignified, by petty details from the Suffolk Correspondence, or the chronique scandaleuse of "coffin-faced" John Hervey-that "Curll of Court, as Pope calls him among other things, not without reason. Leigh Huntlight-heartedly fills his vacant spaces with not always relevant gossip of the Georgian maid of honour-of Pitt's "sister Anne," as like him as "deux gouttes de feu;" of the charming and sensible Molly Lepel, to whom Hervey was already married; of the two handsome Bellendens, Madge and Mary; of Miss Hobart (afterwards Lady Suffolk), and all that Bella Brigata whom John Gay sings so lustily in his cheery "Welcome to Pope from Greece." The author of the Old Court Suburb also manages to spin a long chapter out of the cruelly-clever "Kensington drama " in which Hervey depicts the effect of a report of his own death upon the little Court circle-a document wholly admirable in its remorseless analysis of character, and its disclosure of Court perfidies, banalities, formalities, but far too long for our present purpose which, after all, is no more than to describe the scene of action.

The structural additions made by Kent for the first George were continued under the second, and consisted mainly of a west wing intended as a nursery. But the alterations in the surrounding grounds, due in great measure to the initiative of Caroline of Ansbach, were more radical and more extensive. After William's London and Anne's Wise, came the Bridgeman and Kent of their successors, under whose auspices stretches of lawn were substituted for "scrolled-work" parterres, and groves and avenues took the place of "verdant sculptures" and "square precision." Although Bridgeman still clipped his hedges, it was "with a difference;" and he adopted, if he did not originate, the “ha-ha” and sunk fence, the pictorial effect of which was practically to annex the outlying country to the enclosure. With Kent and the next régime, Queen Anne's trim gardens to the north and south successively disappeared; while to the east, treeshaded walks and vistas into the park began to open in all directions. Slopes were softened; hollows gently lifted; where now towers the Albert Memorial, a revolving temple rose from its "specular mount"; the Round Pound was evolved; the string of West Bourne Pools became the Serpentine (which, a literal bard remarks, is not "serpentine"), and the Broad Walk was laid,

Thus, by gradual and almost imperceptible degrees, came into existence those full-leaved and umbrageous Kensington Gardens, of whose "lone open glade" and "air-stirr'd forest, fresh and clear," Arnold found it possible to sing in the sixties:

In the huge world, which roars hard by,

Be others happy if they can!

But in my helpless cradle I

Was breathed on by the rural Pan,

lines that are as far-removed from Tickell's "glossy damasks' and "showery bow" as the landscape garden is from the formal, or the romantic school from the classical.

But Matthew Arnold and the sixties are also a hundred years away from the death of George II., the date at which this paper ends. It would be easy to speak of some of the later tenants of the place of the Duke of Sussex, who here assembled his fine library; of ill-starred Caroline of Brunswick, who, for a brief space, aired her peculiarities in its precincts; and of Queen Victoria's parents, the Duke and Duchess of Kent. To Queen Victoria herself, who was born in one of its rooms on the south-east, underneath the King's Gallery, we owe its present condition and partial accessibility. Her late Majesty determined that the house in which she first saw the light should not be allowed to fall to pieces, which, not so very long ago, seemed only too probable; and at her Diamond Jubilee, it was decided by Parliament that it should be properly put in order, and that its state apartments, which since October 1760, when King George II. died, had been closed and unoccupied, should be opened to the public. The repairs and restorations, which were most conscientiously and judiciously effected, completely realise the intention of the work, namely the creation of “an objectlesson in history and art." These words are taken from the "Preface" to the Kensington Palace of Mr. Ernest Law-an unpretentious little handbook which supplies from official sources, not only much indispensable information as to the development of the building, but a full and interesting description of its present appearance and contents.

AUSTIN DOBSON..

NEW YORK JOURNALISM: A SNAPSHOT

ALL American journals are not "yellow." "Yellow journalism” is not an altogether monstrous institution, stamping down every tradition of decency and morality in its greed for dollars.

It is necessary to begin a surface consideration of New York journalism with those contradictions of general misconceptions. There are in New York papers as sober in view, as dutiful in responsibility, as accurate in judgment, as any in London, though they are, of course, different from London papers, because they have to serve a vastly different class of readers. The "yellow" journals offend against good taste very often, but they do not offend against decency or morality. They are reckless about the accuracy of the news they publish, reckoning that what is wrong. may always be corrected the next day-or not corrected, as convenience may serve. But take away the offences against good taste, and the want of care in investigating sensational stories before publication, and the "yellow paper" is not a bad sort of thing. It is simply unusual to the British or the Australian observer. But then it has to serve an unusual population. And there is no moral wrong in putting red-ink headlines on your big news if your public likes things that way.

The essential basis of New York journalism is that New York is eagerly, pettily, provincially interested in New York, and very little interested in anything else. The New York public must be given, piping hot, a record of New York life, and a record of certain happenings outside of New York which show either (a) that the foreigners of Boston, New Orleans, Canada, and Europe can under some circumstances act curiously like New Yorkers, or (b) that the said foreigners can, under some circumstances, act so barbarously unlike New Yorkers as to be infinitely amusing. New York is not in the least interested in

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European politics, nor even in American politics. It is not interested in great social developments and tendencies. wants the blood and the ballet of life from all over the world, but most particularly the blood and the ballet of New York, the sensational murders, the intimate records of the queens of the stage.

The "human interest" story is a feature of New York journalism at first a little astonishing, then a great deal captivating. Its foundation is the principle that the romantic or humorous happenings of the "common people" are, properly treated, as vividly interesting to the newspaper reader as dynastic changes or great battles. The child kidnapped dramatically from the slums, the street Arab risking his life to save a dog, the love romance of an unimportant couple when it is tinged. with an unusual note of happiness or tragedy-such things make up the "human interest" story, and will occupy pride of place on the first page to the exclusion of the latest development in the Balkans, the dissolving of a Russian Duma, or a British General Election. In the "yellow' journals the "human interest" story tends to degenerate into "keyhole journalism into grossly offensive spyings on domestic privacy. But in its best form the "human interest" story is good reading, and, moreover, edifying reading-a terrible word, edifying, but it conveys. my exact meaning.

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Dana Gibson, founder of the New York Sun, was, I believe, the first exploiter of the "human interest" story. In those days, for that reason and others, his paper was looked upon as being "yellow" of the most jaundiced type. Nowadays it is counted one of the most reputable of New York dailies, particularly attaching to itself University men. It still deals in "human interest" stories, still keeps an elaborate pretence of flippancy in its editorial columns, but yet is a journal of serious purpose and high ideals.

The Hearst publications are the most typical of the "yellow" journals-the New York Evening Journal, to cite a precise example. The Hearst policy is to yell a paper. Its headlines yell. Its stories yell. Its methods of news-gathering yell. And of course its vendors yell, as only the New York gamin can yell.

Two typical examples of Hearst journalistic enterprise will

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