My London friend, who evidently enjoys our astonishment at the vastness of the London Parks, and the apparent display and real enjoyment they minister to, calculates that not less than 50,000 persons have been out, on foot, on horseback, or in carriages, this afternoon, and adds that upon review days, or other occasions of particular brilliancy, he has known 200,000 persons to be in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens at once.

You may be weary of Parks to day, but I shall not allow you to escape me without a glance at Regent's Park, another link in the rural scenery of this part of London. Yes, here are three hundred and thirty six acres more of lawn, ornamental plantations, drives and carriage roads. Regent's Park has a younger look than any of the others in the West end of London, having only been planted about twenty-five or thirty years - but it is a beautiful surface, containing a great variety of different scenes within itself. Here are, for instance, the Royal Botanic Garden, with its rich collection of plants, and its beautiful flower-shows, which I have already described to you; and the Zoological Garden, some twenty acres in extent, where you may see almost every living animal as nearly as possible in the same circumstances as in its native country. Over the lawns walk the giraffe and camel-leopard, led by Arabs in oriental costume; among the leafy avenues you see elephants waddling along with loads of laughing, half-frightened children on their backs; down in a deep pool of water you peer upon the sluggish hippopotamus; you gaze at the soft eyes of the gazelle as she feeds in her little private paddock, and you feed the black swans that are floating along with innumerable other rare aquatic birds, upon the surface of glassy lakes of fresh water.

And "the Zoological" is just as full of people as Hyde Park, though of a totally different appearance - many students in natural history, some fashionable loungers, chiefly women, more curious strangers, and most of all, boys and girls, feeding their juvenile appetite for the marvellous, by seeing the less astonished animals fed.

And whose are those pretty country residences that you see in the very midst of another part of Regent's Park - beautiful Italian villas and ornamental cottages, embowered in trees of their own, and only divided from the open park by a light railing and belts of shrubbery? These are the villas of certain favored nobles, who have, at large cost, realised, as you see, the perfection of a residence in town, viz: a country-house in the midst of a great park, which is itself in the midst of a great city. In these favored sites the owners have the luxury of quiet, and rural surroundings, usually confined to the country, with the whole of the great world of May Pair and politics within ten or twenty minutes walk.

And now, having been through more than a thousand acres of park scenery, and witnessed the enjoyments of tens of thousands of persons of all classes, to whom these parks are open from sunrise to nine o'clock at night, you will naturally ask me if these luxuries are wholly confined to the West End of London. By no means. In almost all parts of

London are "squares" - open places of eight or ten acres, filled with trees, shrubs, grass and fountains - like what we call "parks" in our cities at home. Besides these, a large new space called the Victoria Park - of two hundred and ninety acres, has been laid out lately in the East part of London, expressly for the recreation and amusement of the poorer classes who are confined to that part of the town.

You see what noble breathing-places London has, within its own boundaries, for the daily health and recreation of its citizens. But these by no means comprise all the rural pleasures of its inhabitants. There are three other magnificent public places within half an hour of London, which are also enjoyed daily by thousands and tens of thousands. I mean Hampton Court, Richmond Park, and the National Gardens at Kew.

Hampton Court, is the favorite resort of the middle classes on holidays, and a pleasanter sight than that spot on such occasions. - when it is thronged by immense numbers of citizens, their wives and children, with all the riches of that grand old palace, its picture-galleries, halls, and splendid apartments, its two parks and its immense pleasure grounds thrown open to them, is not easily found. Indeed, a man may be dull enough to care for neither palaces nor parks, for neither nature nor art, but he can scarcely be human, or have a spark of sympathy in the fortunes of his race, if he can wander without interest through these magnificent Halls, still in perfect order, built with the most kingly prodigality by the most ambitious and powerful of subjects - Woolsey: halls that were afterwards successively the home of Henry the VIII, Elizabeth, James, Charles and Cromwell; halls where Shakespeare played and Sidney wrote, but which, with all their treasures of art, are now the people's palace and normal school of enjoyment.

I am neither going to weary you with catalogues of pictures or dissertations upon palace architecture. But I must give you one more impression - that of the magnificent surroundings of Hampton Court. Conjure up a piece of country of diversified rich meadow surface, some five or six miles in circuit; imagine, around the palace, some forty or fifty acres of gardens, mostly in the ancient taste, with pleached alleys, (Queen Mary's bower among them,) sloping banks of soft turf, huge orange trees in boxes, and a "wilderness" or labyrinth where you may lose yourself in the most intricate perplexity of shrubs; imagine an avenue a mile and a quarter long, of the most gigantic horse-chestnuts you ever beheld, with long vistas of velvet turf and highly-dressed garden scenery around them; [see Frontispiece] imagine other parts of the park where you see on all sides, only great masses and groups of oaks and elms of centuries growth, and all the freedom of luxuriant nature, with a broad carpet of grass stretching on all sides; with distant portions of the park quite wild-looking, dotted with great hawthorn trees of centuries growth, with the tangled copse and fragrant fern which are the belongings of our own forests, and then fill up the scene in the neighborhood of the palace and gardens as I have before said, on a holiday, with thousands of happy faces, while in the secluded parts of the park the timid deer flits before you, the birds stealthily build their nests, and the insect's hum fills the silent air, and you have some faint idea of the value of such a possession for the population of a great city to pass their holidays in, or to go pic-nic-ing!

I am writing you a long letter, but the parkomanie is upon me, and I will not let the ink dry in my pen without a word about Richmond Great Park - also free to the public, and also within the reach of the Londoner who seeks for air and exercise. Richmond Great Park was formerly a Royal hunting ground, but, like all the parks I have mentioned, has been given up to the people - at least the free enjoyment of it. It is the largest of all the parks I have described, being eight miles round, and containing 2,250 acres ferns, the surface gently undulating, and dotted with grand old oaks - extremely like what you see on a still larger scale in Kentucky. Its solitude and seclusion, within sight of London - are almost startling. The land is high, and from one side of it your eye wanders over the valley of Richmond - with the Thames - here only a silvery looking stream winding through it - a world-renowned view and one whose sylvan beauty it is impossible to praise too highly. Just in this part of the Park, and commanding this superb view, with the towers of Windsor Castle in the distance on one side, and the dome of St. Paul's on the other, and all the antique sylvan seclusion of the old wood around it, stands a modest little cottage - the favorite summer residence of Lord John Russell, the use of which has been given him by his sovereign.

A more unambitious looking home, and one better calculated to restore the faculties of an over-worked premier, after a day's toil in Downing Street, it would be impossible to conceive.

I drove through Richmond Great Park in the carriage of the Belgian minister, and his accomplished wife, who was my cicerone, stopped the coachman for a moment near this place, in order that she might point out to me an old oak that had a story to tell. "It was here - just under this tree," she added, (her eyes gleaming slightly with womanly indignation as she said it,) "that the cruel Henry stood, and saw with his own eyes, the signal made from the Tower of London, (five miles off,) which told him that Anne Boleyn was at that moment beheaded!" I thanked God that oak trees were longer lived than bad monarchs, and that modern civilization would no longer permit such butchery in a christian country.

I will close this letter with only a single remark. We fancy, not without reason, in New-York, that we have a great city, and that the introduction of Croton water, is so marvelous a luxury in the way of health, that nothing more need be done for the comfort of half a million of people. In crossing the Atlantic, a young New-Yorker, who was rabidly patriotic, and who boasted daily of the superiority of our beloved commercial metropolis over every city on the globe, was our most amusing companion. I chanced to meet him one afternoon a few days after we landed, in one of the great Parks in London, in the midst of all the sylvan beauty and human enjoyment, I have attempted to describe to you. He threw up his arms as he recognised me, and exclaimed - "good heavens! what a scene, and / took some Londoners to the steps of the City Hall last summer, to show them the Park of New-York!" I consoled him with the advice to be less conceited thereafter in his cockney-ism, and to show foreigners the Hudson and Niagara, instead of the City Hall and Bowling Green. But the question may well be asked, is New York really not rich enough, or is there absolutely not land enough in America, to give our citizens public parks of more than ten acres? Yours sincerely, A. J. D.