450 Notes of Ike Month on 



in publicity. Yet even this publicity was accident* Committees, audi- 

 tors, secretaries, the full machinery of check and supervision, had long 

 been in motion ; yet not one of these vigilant persons seems to have had 

 an idea of the fact, that they were on the eve of bankruptcy, till some 

 anonymous billet in a newspaper gave them the intelligence. 



Then all was wonder and speech-making. After a succession of 

 meetings, a grand meeting of the members of the society was held a fort- 

 night since, in the hall of the institution, Regent- street, for the purpose 

 of receiving the report of the committee appointed to inquire into the 

 state of the society's debts, &c. The debts were shown to be 19,7#0/., 

 and the assets were estimated at 16,500f. It was thought 1,000 per 

 annum might be saved by retrenchment. Mr. Sabine's resignation was 

 announced. 



How the debts of any society under heaven could hare amounted 

 to 19,000/. without any of its governing members knowing the 

 circumstance, appears to us among the oddest things imaginable. 

 The president was in such astonishment at the discovery, that he has 

 remained in a state of astonishment ever since. The committee and 

 Mr. Sabine were equally thunderstruck j and, till now, seem to have but 

 very imperfectly recovered their faculties. Yet an account of receipts 

 and disbursements was furnished, in a very clerk-like style, every year, 

 at the general meeting ; though, from Mr. Gordon's speeches, we 

 cannot perceive that the intelligence made its way into it, that the 

 society owed 19,000/., and was 3,000/, worse than a beggar. Of course 

 we have no idea of charging any fraudulent intent in this on any of the 

 parties ; for of fraud no evidence strikes us. But the negligence some- 

 were is perfectly unaccountable. The whole business always exhibited 

 a most nourishing aspect in the reports transmitted to the newspapers. 

 The monthly meetings sent away every member in raptures at the 

 prodigious celebrity and infinite expansion of that Horticultural Society, 

 which was to fill every cottage in England with grapes and Newtown 

 pippins, and astonish the ends of the earth with the British pomona. 

 On those days it was perilous to walk through Regent- street, at least s6 

 long as Sir Watkin Williams was in sight, to hold one by the button, 

 and panegyrize the exquisite buttermilk raised from his last specimen of 

 mangel wurzel ; or Mr. Frankland Lewis, with both his pockets full of 

 raw potatoes, to rush out in the spirit of liberal distribution to all who 

 on that day had the calamity to be his friends. 



The horticultural dinner was always a superb affair, so far as mutual 

 congratulation, and hobnobbing to fructification, subscription, granula- 

 tion, and the eternal countenance of grandees, were concerned. There 

 was not an assembly on earth in which was felt more zeal in getting 

 drunk for the good of grafting. And when the meeting at last gave 

 way, there was not a member, whether slumbering in his bed, or pre- 

 ferring the more congenial repose under the table of the society, but felt 

 visions of Pomological (the Greek- Latin hybrid belongs to Mr. Phillips) 

 glory dazzling his nightmare, and unborn orchards crowding on his 

 soul. 



But then comes the explosion terrible and strange. The apples 

 were apples of Sodom. The prosperity was all rind; and accounts 

 unexamined, bills unpaid, and debts unconjectured, made the core. 

 The golden pippin was dust, and the silver pomegranate was ashes. 

 And the members went away, like the feeders on the Sardonic herb, 



