A DAY OF DISTRESS. 149 



to my knowledge as an advocate of the fine arts or of 

 their cultivation. Whether his views were correct or 

 otherwise is not a question for my consideration, al- 

 though the treatment of such a matter, by competent 

 individuals, might be both valuable and interesting ; 

 holding opinions of such a tendency and knowing at 

 the same time that the Temple of Minerva, was insti- 

 tuted for the purpose, among others already mentioned, 

 of promoting the culture and improvement of the fine 

 arts, B B seldom spoke when this sub- 

 ject was under consideration, and not often on any 

 collateral topic. 



THEOBALD. 

 Barnstaple,Feb. 1833. 



A DAY OF DISTRESS. 



It was a glorious June morning ; and I got up gay and bright, 

 as the Americans say, to breakfast in the pretty summer-room 

 overlooking the garden, which, built partly for my accommodation 

 and partly for that of my geraniums, who make it their winter 

 residence, is as regularly called the green-house as if I and my 

 several properties sofas, chairs, tables, chiffonieres, and ottomans 

 did not inhabit it during the whole of the fine season ; or as if 

 it were not in its own person a well-proportioned and spacious 

 apartment no otherways to be distinguished from common drawing 

 rooms than by being nearly fronted with glass, about which out-of- 

 door myrtles, passion-flowers, clematis, and the Persian honey- 

 suckle, form a most graceful and varied frame-work, not unlike the 

 festoons of flowers and foliage which one sees round some of the 

 scarce and high-prized tradesmen's cards, and ridotto tickets of 

 Hogarth and Bartolozzi. Large glass folding doors open into the 

 little garden, almost surrounded by old buildings of the most pic- 

 turesque form the buildings themselves partly hidden by cluster- 

 ing vines, and my superb bay-tree, its shining leaves glittering in 

 'the sun on one side, whilst a tall pear-tree, garlanded to the very 

 top with an English honey-suckle in full flower, breaks the hori- 

 zontal line of the low cottage-roof on the other; the very pear- 

 tree being, in its own turn, half concealed by a splendid pyramid 

 of geraniums erected under its shade. Such geraniums ; It does 

 not become us poor mortals to be vain but really, my geraniums ! 

 There is certainly nothing but the garden into which Aladdin found 

 his way, and where the fruit was composed of gems, that can 



