48 ‘“GREEN DALE CABINET.” 
to bear emphatic record—a careful representation of the Green 
Dale Oak was, with other of the noted trees, designed to form the 
subject of sculpture in white marble, of one of the chimney pieces 
in the new part of the mansion. 
The Green Dale Oak, as it now stands, propped, supported, 
chained, and lovingly preserved on all sides, is assuredly, while 
eminently picturesque in its every aspect, the grandest, most 
solemn looking, and venerable “wreck of ages” that any forest 
monarch—not even excepting the ‘‘ Parliament Oak”—in appear- 
ance presents ; but in spite of its hoary age, its desolateness of 
aspect, and its apparent decay, it still retains its vitality, and 
gives out year by year fresh foliage in its upper branches, 
It is not, as Shakspere has it, an ‘‘unwedgeable and gnarled 
oak ”—‘‘ an oak, but with one green leaf upon it”—but an oak 
whose once ‘“‘ unwedgeable and gnarled” and knotty trunk and 
branches are now softened down, decayed, and rotted away into 
little better than “touch-wood,” but yet with its hundreds of 
leaves, season after season springing into life, giving to its hoary 
and propped-up frame a crown of joy and beauty, with just here 
and there an acorn to give evidence that even in the last stages of 
decay its powers of vitality are not yet exhausted. 
The Flolltes, 
Duffield, Derby. 
eee 
