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my attention, as did the general elevated physiognomy of this person. 

 I could not suppress my curiosity, and asked Mr. Don who this little 

 manmightbe. When he replied, Senor Lagasca! I threw myself into 

 the arms of my old friend, who was much puzzled to imagine who 

 I could be, for w^e had only known each other by correspondence, 



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whjlch had continued for some years j and here we met, as in a dream, 

 where w^e least expected to see one another. Poor Lagasca ! he had 

 not only lost all his domestic happiness, (his wife and five children 



being in Cadiz,) and his 



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manuscript of his Flora of Spain, on which be had been employed for 

 more than twenty years, and w^hich was ready to be printed ; even 

 the manuscript of his Monograph of the Cerealia, with the dried 



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there completed it, — all, all were destroyed ! He saved nothing from 

 the great shipwreck of that Cortes to which his talents and virtue 

 had raised him, but his own life. Far from his beautiful country, 

 and from his beloved relations, he now lives in the foggy and expen- 

 sive London, where he participates in the afflictions of so many of 

 his worthy and exiled countrymen ! 



Lagasca and I met almost daily after this interview^ and made . 

 some botanical excursions together : among other places, to the cele- 

 brated gardens of Kew. We did not see Mr. Townsend Aiton^ as 

 he had been called away to Windsor ; but in this well known garden, 

 whose Catalogue has given it so much celebrity, we did not find the 

 pleasure that we had anticipated. We were disappointed particularly 

 in the plants w hich grow in the open air, which are not so accurately 

 named as those in the Gottingen Botanic Garden, superintended by 

 Schrader : sometimes the same species Is marked with two different 

 names. The garden at Kew consists of a fine park, and a large 

 botanical garden of about twenty acres. What w^e usually term a 

 park In Germany is like anything rather than what receives the 

 same appellation in England ; and which is neither more nor less 

 than a w^ood, in which nature and art seem to dispute for the original 

 formation and present possession. As in a wood, one may walk, ride 

 and drive about it, without risk of interruption. Enghsh parks are ^ 

 in fact beautiful woods, and nothing more ; and it will ever remain 

 onp of the most difficult nroblems in the delightful science of laying 



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