1831.] Affairs in General. 7T 



London : — in fact, it was next to impossible to sleep, the boatmen began 

 to make a noise at so unseasonable an hour. He had a right to know, 

 as he had tried the principal sleeping places ; — he had slept on the flags 

 in Old Fleet Market, in the pens of Smithfield, under the arches of 

 London Bridge, on the pavement in the Minories, in the lime-kilns of 

 Paddington, among the repairs of St. Saviour's, and in St. Michael's 

 church-yard ; but he never slept in so uncomfortable a place as Billings- 

 gate market. He was sorry to give a bad character of any place, es- 

 pecially in a court of justice ; but he must say, upon his honour, that a 

 man had no business to go there, unless he had first got blind drunk, 

 wliich, in his opinion, no respectable person would do.'' 



A new institution, and, we think, one highly deserving of public 

 patronage, has been lately set on foot in Ireland, entitled the " Arbori- 

 cultural Society," a rough sounding name, but which is intended to 

 mean a society for the encouragement of planting trees. We should 

 greatly like to see such a society established in England ; where we are 

 as much in want of information on the culture of trees, as in Ireland ; 

 and where we want something of the kind, much more than our showy 

 Horticultural Society, which seems to do little else than produce " im- 

 proved specimens" of the Marygold, and so foi'th ; and has not cheapened 

 a single gooseberry since its creation. Every body would be a planter, 

 if every body knew how, for of all propensities it is the most natural, 

 the most pleasant in its indulgence, and the most profitable in its results. 

 But the science is in the hands of a few, if indeed any one man in the 

 country knows much about it. The Germans have a regular course of 

 education for the " forest masters," and whole summers are spent in the 

 woods under the guidance of professors, who give lectures on the modes 

 of planting, lopping, preserving, cutting, in short on every point of the 

 subject ; and, as well as we can recollect, the course is considered incom- 

 plete under three years. Our rustic, whether peasant or gentleman, 

 considers his education complete in as many days or hours. 



A letter on the occasion, among many striking remarks, says ; — 



" There is, perhaps, no ciyilized country in which the want of timber is 

 more strongly felt than in Ireland. Any person who, on a bleak autumnal 

 evening, has watched the cattle deserthig the pasture for the shelter of an old 

 ditch or a solitary thorn-tree, must be convinced that shelter is necessary for 

 their comfort. Any person who has remarked the gradual decline of vegeta- 

 tion, in proportion as the eye turns from the neighbourhood of the rising screen 

 to the more distant parts of I he same field, must allow that a defence from 

 the cutting winds of spring is favourable to the growth of herbage — and he 

 must have a hard heart who does not pity the poor, who are forced to waste 

 the time, which might be otherwise profitably employed, in stealing from the 

 hedges the only means of cooking their scanty meal, or of buying at a rate too 

 heavy for their means, the only roof which may defend them from the incle- 

 mency of the weather." 



But more than fertility and shelter may be concerned. The dishonesty 

 of the lower orders generally begins in the plunder of the hedges : — 



" Independent of the bleakness of the country, the want of timber has a 

 serious effect upon the degradation of our peasantry. He who has no resource 

 for supplying the necessaries of life, but those which require capital beyond 

 his means, is necessarily debarred from improvement. Mow many a labourer 

 has heen visited by sickness for want of a hit of utirk to render his loof a de- 

 fence against the severity of the weather .'' How often has a rising spirit of 



