8 A BOOK ABOUT ROSES. 



good Roses from the broad acres of good Rose-trees. 

 These collections remind us of Martial's description of 

 his works, " Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala 

 plura." We can hardly say of them, as an Edinburgh 

 Reviewer (was it Sydney Smith ?) of a volume of sermons, 

 criticised in the first number of that work, " Their charac- 

 teristic is decent debility." As a rule, the amateur Ros- 

 arian has made about as much progress as George III. 

 with his fiddle. After two years' tuition, the King asked 

 his tutor, Viotti, what he thought of his pupil : " Sire," re- 

 plied the professor, " there are three classes of violinists ; 

 those who cannot play at all, those who play badly, and 

 those who play well. Your majesty is now covnncncing to 

 enter upon the second of these classes." There is not a 

 garden nowadays, of any pretension, which has not its col- 

 lection of Roses, and yet there is not one garden in twenty 

 where the flower is realised in its beauty. I have scarcely 

 known at times whether to laugh or weep, when I have 

 been conducted with a triumphal air by the proprietor to 

 one of those dismal slaughter-houses which he calls his 

 Rosary. The collection is surrounded by a few miserable 

 climbers, justly gibbeted on poles or hung in rusty chains, 

 and consists of lanky standards, all legs and no head, after 



