to the delight and instruction of the moral and intellectual world."--History of Fossil Fuel, pp. 289, 290.

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 prostrate, for the fatal disorder will have reach

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!noblest and most easily governed of any on for, depend upon it, the British people are the the face of the earth.

Since this article was put in type Lord Ashley has obtained the unanimous assent of the House of Commons for the introduction of a bill 'to make Regulations respecting, the Age and Sex of Children and Young Persons employed in the Mines and Collieries of the United Kingdom.' After perusing this Report-with its detailed Ap-ed its vitals. pendices, and the terrible woodcuts that accompany them-it was impossible for us to doubt that Lord Ashley would receive the cordial support of Her Majesty's Government in such a measure. But we were not prepared for, and therefore we were indeed most highly gratified by, the unanimity of the House of Commons on the 7th of June. We would fain hail it as an evidence that not by any one class of politicians alone, but by all, the danger of neglecting the moral and social and also the physical condition of the poor in this rich and powerful empire has at length been understood and appreciated; and as an omen and pledge that henceforth, as now, English gentlemen of all parties will be found ready to act together as men and as Christians when the afflictions of their humble fellow-countrymen are brought under their consideration as legislators. Lord Ashley's speech was indeed a happy specimen of clear statement, intermixed with numberless touches of simply and deeply pathetic eloquence :no man could listen to it without being reminded of Wilberforce. Such a speech might well, as a display of high talents, excite admiration and applause; but these are not days when rhetoric, or even oratory, can produce, in regard to subjects of this kind, any decisive practical effect. The House must have been operated on by circumstances of a very different character: they felt, we hope and believe, that this was the first step in a path which must be pursued, if our working classes-unequalled in the history of the world for courage, energy, and native goodness of feeling-are to be reconciled to the great existing institutions of their country-not excepting the institution of property, which, like all the rest, can only deserve to be supported as being for the general advantage.

:

Their fortitude and

obedience under the severest privations suffi-
ciently 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 em-
pire. 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 neces-
sary, 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 Chris-
tian 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
their inherited freedom, and avail themselves
newness of life, to enter on the enjoyment of
(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 hav-
ing 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."

'I hope, Sir,' said Lord Ashley, that the-Speech, &c., p. 57. 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.

Marie Antoinette; nor will an Englishman | cients. They would have us consider all easily forget the grounds of Claremont, classical gardens as little more than kitchenwhich 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. At the present moment great things are promised at Windsor, both 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.

gardens or orchards-to use the expression of Walpole, a cabbage and a gooseberrybush.' This is a great mistake. The love of flowers is as clearly traceable in the pòets 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 order* indeed of their olive-groves had a protecting deity Little new is to be said upon the history at Athens, and with such exactness did of gardening. Horace Walpole and Daines they set out the elms which supported Barrington have well nigh exhausted the their vines, that Virgil compares them to subject, and all later writers go over the the rank and file of a Roman legion. But same ground. Beginning with the Eden the fair-clustering't narcissus and the of our first parents, we have the old stories' gold-gleaming' crocus were reckoned of the orchard of the Hesperides, and the among the glories of Attica as much as the dragon, and the golden fruit (now explain- nightingale, and the olive, and the steed; ed to be oranges,)-the gardens of Adonis and the violet was as proud a device of -the Happy Isles-the hanging terraces of the Ionic Athenians, as the rose of England, Babylon till with a passing glance at or the lily of France. The Romans are those of Alcinous and Laertes, as describ- even censured by their lyric poet § for aled by Homer, we arrive at the Gardens of lowing their fruitful olive-groves to give Epicurus and the Academe of Plato. Ro- place to beds of violets, and myrtles, and man history brings up the rear with the vil- all the 'wilderness of sweets.' The first las of Cicero and Pliny, the fruits of Lu- rose of spring || and the last rose of sumcullus, the roses of Pæstum, and Cæsar's mer' 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 of Enna than has the author of the Fasti. more glowingly painted the flowery mead Cicero **

"Private arbours and new-planted orchards On this side Tiber.'

To how different a science 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 an

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.

vation of flowers among the delights of the distinctly enumerates the cultihe given us his Georgic on Horticulture, he country; and Virgil ff assures us that, had would not have forgotten the narcissus or acanthus, the ivy, the myrtle, or the rosegardens of Pæstum. The moral which Burns drew from his 'mountain daisy' had been marked before both by Virgil ‡‡ 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 described the gentleman of Imerry old Athens' as 'redolent of honey

suckles and holidays;'* and which is so and, where the ground admits of them, conspicuous in our own Shakspeare as to tiers rising one above the other-vases and have led to some late ingenious surmises statues (not half hidden in a shrubbery, or that he was born and bred a gardener. † indiscriminately scattered over a lawn, but) Addison amused himself by comparing connected, and in character with the house the different styles of gardening with those itself-these, with marble fountains and of poetry- Your makers of parterres and such relics of antiquity as may have been flower-gardens are epigrammatists and son-discovered in the neighbourhood, form the netteers; contrivers of bowers and grottos, chief beauties of the magnificent gardens of treillages and cascades, are romance-writ- Italy, which have in many instances swalers;' while the gravel-pits in Kensington lowed up the whole wealth of their princely Gardens, then just laid out by London and possessors. Spite of Walpole's sneer about Wise, were heroic verse. If our modern walking up and down stairs in the open critics were to draw a similar comparison, air,' we own that there are to us few things we suppose our gardens would be divided so beautiful in art as stately terraces, tier into the Classical and the Romantic. The above tier, and bold flights of stone steps, first would embrace the works of the Italian, now stretching forward in a broad unbroken Dutch, and French, the second those of the course, now winding around the angle of Chinese and English schools. The cha- the terrace in short and steep descents, each racteristics of the three symmetric styles landing affording some new scene, some are not easily to be distinguished, but from change of sun or shade-a genial baskingthe climate and character of the nations, per- place, or cool retreat-here the rich perhaps even more than from the actual ex- fume of an ancestral* orange-tree, there amples existing in their respective coun- the bright blossom of some sunny creeper-tries, a division has been made which is while at another turn a balcony juts out to recognized in most works on gardening, catch some distant view, or a recess is and may be useful in practice in keeping formed with seats for the loitering party to us to that leading idea' on which the cri- rest and be thankful.' Let all these be tics insist so strongly, but which has been connected by colonnades with the architec sadly neglected in most modern examples. ture of the mansion, and you have a far The Italian style is undoubtedly the off- more rational appendage to its necessarily spring, or rather the continuation, of the artificial character than the petty wilderxystus and quincunx of the ancient Ro- nesses and picturesque abandon which With them the garden was only have not been without advocates up to the the amplification of the house: if indeed very lintel and threshold. their notion of a villa did not almost sink Isola Bella, the creation of Vitaliano the consideration of the roofed rooms in Borromeo, may be considered as the extrathe magnificence of the colonnades and ter- vagant type of the Italian style. A barren races that surrounded them. The same rock, rising in the midst of a lake, and prospirit has animated the style of modern ducing nothing but a few poor lichens, has Italy. The garden immediately about the been converted into a pyramid of terraces, house is but the extension of the style and supported on arches, and ornamented with materials of which the buildings themselves bays and orange-trees of amazing size and are composed. Broad paved terraces-beauty.

mans.

* opídakos özwv kai ànpaypooúvns. Aristoph. [Nub. gardens.

1007.

The French are theatrical even in their There is an effort after spectacle and display which, while it wants the grace We may perhaps return to the subject of ancient gardens. Meanwhile we answer to Daines of the Italians, is yet free from the pueriliBarrington's remark, that, 'he knew of no Greek or ties of the Dutch. The gardens of VerLatin word for nosegay,' that the ancients wore their sailles may be taken as the great exemplar flowers on their head, not in their bosom; and there of this style; and magnificent indeed they is surely mention enough about 'oripavoi' and 'co

rone. But we need hardly wonder at such an over- are, if expense and extent and variety suf sight in an anthor who, noticing the passages on fice to make up magnificence. Two hunflowers in our early poets, makes no allusion to Shaks- dred acres and two hundred millions of peare. To H. Walpole, who says 'their gardens francs were the materials which Louis are never mentioned as affording shade and shelter from the rage of the dog-star,' we can now only

quote

and

'Spissa ramis laurea fervidos
Excludet ictus;'

-'platanum potantibus umbram ;'
and Hor. ii. xi. 13. The platanus was the newly in-
troduced garden-wonder of the Augustan age.

XIV. handed over to Le Nôtre, wherewith to construct them. To draw petty figures in dwarf-box, and elaborate patterns

*There are in Holland many orange-trees which have been in the same family 200 and 300 years; one at Versailles has the inscription Semé en 1421.'