excepting the institution of property, which, like all the rest, can only deserve to be supported as being for the general advantage. I hope, Sir,' said Lord Ashley, 'that the House will not consider that I am speaking dogmatically on these subjects: my intercourse with the working classes, both by correspondence and personal interview, has for many years been so extensive, that I think I may venture to say that I am conversant with their feelings and habits, and can state their probable movements. I do not fear any violent or general outbreaks on the part of the population: there may be a few, but not more than will be easily repressed by the ordinary force of the country. But I do fear the progress of a cancer, a perilous, and, if we much longer delay, an incurable cancer, which has seized upon the body social, moral, and political; and then in some day, when there shall be required on the part of our people an unusual energy, an unprecedented effort of virtue and patriotism, the strength of the empire will be found prostrate, for the fatal disorder will have reached its vitals. There are, I well know, many other things to be done; but this, I must maintain, is an indispensable preliminary: for it is a mockery to talk of education to people who are engaged, as it were, in unceasing toil from their cradle to their grave. I have endeavoured for many years to attain this end by limiting the hours of labour, and so bringing the children and young persons within the reach of a moral and religious education. I have hitherto been disappointed, and I deeply regret it, because we are daily throwing away a noble material!—for, depend upon it, the British people are the noblest and the most easily governed of any on the face of the earth. Their fortitude and obedience under the severest privations sufficiently prove it. (Loud cheers.) Sure I am, that the minister of this country, whoever he be, if he will but win their confidence by appealing to their hearts, may bear upon his little finger the whole weight of the reins of the British empire. And, Sir, the sufferings of these people, so destructive to themselves, are altogether needless to the prosperity of the empire.... Could it even be proved that they were necessary, this House, I know, would pause before it undertook to affirm the continuance of them..... What could induce you to tolerate further the existence of such cruelties? Is it not enough to announce these things to an assembly of Christian men and British gentlemen? For twenty millions of money you purchased the liberation of the negro; and it was a blessed deed. You may, this night, by a cheap and harmless vote, invigorate the hearts of thousands of your country people, enable them to walk erect in newness of life, to enter on the enjoyment of their inherited freedom, and avail themselves (if they will accept them) of the opportunities of virtue, of morality, and religion. These, Sir, are the ends that I venture to propose: this is the barbarism that I seek to restore. The House will, I am sure, forgive me for having detained them so long; and still more will they forgive me for venturing to conclude, by imploring them, in the words of Holy Writ, "To break off our sins by righteousness, and our iniquities by showing mercy to the poor, if it may be a lengthening of our tranquillity.""-Speech, &c. P. 57. o 2 ART. ART. VII.1. Gardening for Ladies. By Mrs. Loudon. London. 1841. 2. The Ladies' Companion to the Flower Garden: being an Alphabetical Arrangement of all the Ornamental Plants usually grown in Gardens and Shrubberies; with full Directions for their Culture. By Mrs. Loudon. London. 1841. 3. The Flower Garden: containing Directions for the Cultivation of all Garden Flowers. pp. 515. London. 1841. 4. An Encyclopædia of Gardening: comprising the Theory and Practice of Horticulture, Floriculture, Arboriculture, and Landscape-Gardening, &c. &c. By J. C. Loudon, F.L.S., H.S., &c. 8vo. pp. 1270. London. 5. An Encyclopædia of Plants; with Figures of nearly Ten Thousand Species. Edited by J. C. Loudon. 8vo. pp. 1159. London. London. 1829. 6. Elements of Botany, Structural, Physiological, Systematical, and Medical. By John Lindley, Ph. D., Professor of Botany in University College. London. 1841. 7. A Pocket Botanical Dictionary: comprising the Names, History, and Culture of all Plants known in Britain. By Joseph Paxton, F.L.S., H.S., &c. London, 1840. 8. Botany for Ladies; or, a Popular Introduction to the Natural System of Plants. By Mrs. Loudon. pp. 493. London. 1842. 9. The Orchidacea of Mexico and Guatemala. By James Bateman, Esq. In Parts. 10. Illustrations of the Genera and Species of Orchidaceous Plants. By Francis Bauer, Esq. With Notes and Prefatory Remarks by Dr. Lindley. London. 1840. 11. Sertum Orchideum; or, a Wreath of the most beautiful Orchidaceous Plants. By Dr. Lindley. 1840-1. 1840. 12. A History of British Ferns. By Edward Newman, F.L.S. 8vo. 13. Poetry of Gardening, from The Carthusian,' a Miscellany in Prose and Verse. pp. 528. London. 1839. IF 6 F Dr. Johnson would not stop to inquire whether landscapegardening demands any great powers of the mind,' we may surely be excused from the like investigation on the humbler subject of gardening-proper. But whether or not these pursuits demand, certain it is that they have exercised, the talents of as numerous and brilliant an assemblage of great names as any one subject can boast of. Without travelling into distant times or countries, countries, we find among our own philosophers, poets, and men of taste, who have deemed gardening worthy their regard, the names of Bacon, Evelyn, Temple, Pope, Addison, Sir W. Chambers, Lord Kames, Shenstone, Horace Walpole, Alison, Hope, and Walter Scott. Under the first and last of these authorities, omitting all the rest, we would gladly take our stand in defence of any study to which they had given their sanction on paper and in practice. Even in its own exclusive domain, gardening has raised no mean school of literature in the works of Gilpin, Whateley, the Masons, Knight, Price, and Repton. Time would fail us to tell of all those royal and noble personages whom old Gerarde enumerates in his Herbal' as having either loved to live in gardens,' or written treatises on the subject. We know that Solomon 'spoke of plants, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that groweth out of the wall:'-though here the material surpassed the workmanship, for in all his wisdom he discoursed not so eloquently, nor in all his glory was he so richly arrayed, as one lily of the field.' The vegetable drug mithridate long handed down the name of the King of Pontus, its discoverer, 'better knowne,' says Gerarde, 'by his soveraigne Mithridate, than by his sometime speaking two-and-twenty languages.' What should I say,' continues the old herbalist, after having called in the authorities of Euax king of the Arabians, and Artemisia queen of Caria, 'what should I say of those royal personages, Juba, Attalus, Climenus, Achilles, Cyrus, Masynissa, Semyramis, Dioclesian-all skilled in the excellent art of simpling?' We might easily swell the list by the addition of royal patrons of horticulture in modern times. Among our own sovereigns, Elizabeth, James I., and Charles II. are mentioned as having given their personal superintendence to the royal gardens, while a change in the style of laying out grounds is very generally attributed to the accession of William and Mary-though we doubt whether a horticultural genius would have met with any better or more fitting reception from the hero of the Boyne than did the great wit to whom he offered a cornetcy of dragoons. The gardens of Tzarsco-celo and of Peterhoff were severally the summer resorts of Catherine I. and Elizabeth of Russia, where the one amused herself with building a Chinese village, and the other by cooking her own dinner in the summer-house of Monplaisir. There are more thrilling associations connected with the Jardin Anglais of the Trianon at Versailles, where some rose-trees yet grow which were planted by Marie Antoinette; nor will an Englishman easily forget the grounds of Claremont, which yet cherish the memory and the taste of that truly British princess who delighted to superintend even the arrangement of the flowers in the cottage-garden. the present moment great things are promised at Windsor, be th in the ornamental and useful department; and we trust that the alterations now in progress, avowedly under the eye of royalty, will produce gardens as worthy of the sovereign and the nation, as is the palace to which they are attached. Little new is to be said upon the history of gardening. Horace Walpole and Daines Barrington have well-nigh exhausted the subject, and all later writers go over the same ground. Beginning with the Eden* of our first parents, we have the old stories of the orchard of the Hesperides, and the dragon, and the golden fruit (now explained to be oranges),-the gardens of Adonis,-the Happy Isles, the hanging terraces of Babylon,-till, with a passing glance at those of Alcinous and Laertes, as described by Homer, we arrive at the Gardens of Epicurus and the Academe of Plato. Roman history brings up the rear with the villas of Cicero and Pliny, the fruits of Lucullus, the roses of Pæstum, and Cæsar's 'Private arbours and new-planted orchards On this side Tiber.' To how different a scene in each of these instances the term garden' has been applied we have now no time to inquire; but we may perhaps be allowed, before entering upon the fresher and more inviting scene of the English parterre, to say one word in correction of an error common to all writers on the horticulture of the ancients. They would have us consider all classical gardens as little more than kitchen-gardens or orchards-to use the expression of Walpole, a cabbage and a gooseberry-bush.' This is a great mistake. The love of flowers is as clearly traceable in the poets of antiquity as in those of our own times, and their allusions to them plainly show that they were cultivated with the greatest care. Fruit-trees no doubt were mingled with their flowers, but in the formal, or indeed in any style, this might be made an additional beauty. The very ordert indeed of their We are sorry that Mr. Loudon, in his Encyclopædia, to which every writer on Gardening must feel infinitely obliged, should think it worth while to repeat some silly sneers of Horace Walpole on this subject; as if (what indeed he himself seems to scout) a garden necessarily implied clipped hedges and trellis-work, or as if the new world, fresh from the hand of the Creator, could be anything else than a garden. We might fix on many other passages to find fault with him on the same score. Ne sutor ultra crepidam.-He had better stick to his spade. What have sceptical hints and revolutionary opinions to do with gardening? What indeed can be more opposite to its pure and quiet spirit? To say the least of it, it is ingratitude both to God and man in one whose daily occupation is amongst the fairest works of creation, and whose income is derived from the purest pursuit of an enlightened aristocracy. We trust we may see no more of this. Mr. Loudon may take our word for it, that the circulation and usefulness of his otherwise valuable works are sadly marred by these flourishes. + Soph. Ed. Col. 705. olive-groves had a protecting deity at Athens, and with such exactness did they set out the elms which supported their vines, that Virgil compares them to the rank and file of a Roman legion. But the fair-clustering narcissus and the gold-gleaming crocus were reckoned among the glories of Attica as much as the nightingale, and the olive, and the steed; and the violet † was as proud a device of the Ionic Athenians, as the rose of England, or the lily of France. The Romans are even censured by their lyric poet for allowing their fruitful olive-groves to give place to beds of violets, and myrtles, and all the wilderness of sweets.' The first rose of spring § and the last rose of summer' have been sung in Latin as well as English. Ovid's description of the Floralia will equal any account we can produce of our May-day; nor has Milton himself more glowingly painted the flowery mead of Enna than has the author of the Fasti. Cicero¶ distinctly enumerates the cultivation of flowers among the delights of the country; and Virgil assures us that, had he given us his Georgic on Horticulture, he would not have forgotten the narcissus or acanthus, the ivy, the myrtle, or the rose-gardens of Pæstum. The moral which Burns drew from his mountain daisy' had been marked before both by Virgilft and Catullus; and indeed a glance at the Eclogues, the Georgics, or the Fasti, will show the same love of flowers in their authors which evidently animated Aristophanes, where he describes the gentleman of merry old Athens as redolent of honeysuckle and holidays; §§ and which is so conspicuous in our own Shakspeare as to have led to some late ingenious surmises that he was born and bred a gardener.|||| Addison amused himself by comparing the different styles of ** ++ *Soph. Ed. Col. 682. Aristoph. Equit. 1324. Acharn. 637. Hor. ii. xv. 5. § Virg. Georg. iv. 134. Hor. Od. i. xxviii. 3. Nec vero segetibus solum, et pratis, et vineis, et arbustis res rusticæ lætæ sunt, sed etiam in hortis et pomariis; tum pecudum pastu, apium examinibus, florum omnium varietate.-De Sen., c. 15. En. ix. 435. ‡‡ Catull. xi. ** Georg. iv. 124. Οι σμίλακος όζων και ἀπραγμοσύνης. Aristoph. Νub. 1007. We may perhaps return to the subject of ancient gardens. Meanwhile we answer to Daines Barrington's remark, that he knew of no Greek or Latin word for nosegay,' that the ancients wore their flowers on their head, not in their bosom; and there is surely mention enough about ripava and corona.' But we need hardly wonder at such an oversight in an author who, noticing the passages on flowers in our early poets, makes no allusion to Shakspere. To H. Walpole, who says 'their gardens are never mentioned as affording shade and shelter from the rage of the dog-star,' we can now only quote and 6 'Spissa ramis laurea fervidos -platanum potantibus umbram ;' and Hor. ii. xi. 13. The platanus was the newly introduced garden-wonder of the Augustan age. gardening |