1 90 A BOOK ABOUT ROSES. 



Before we skim their cream as garden Roses, let us re- 

 member with admiration the ancestral cow. For who shall 

 despise those old China Roses, which have brightened more 

 than any other flower our English homes, smiling through 

 our cold and sunless days like the brother born for adver- 

 sity, and winning from the foreigner, as much perhaps as 

 any of our graces, this frequent praise, ''Your land is the 

 garden of the world." The Frenchman, for example, as I 

 can remember him in my boyhood, who had been travelling 

 on the straight, flat, hedgeless, turfless roads of France, in 

 a torpid, torrid, dusty diligence, was in an ecstasy as he sat 

 upon the Dover mail, and went smoothly and cheerily, ten 

 miles per hour, through the meadows and the orchards, the 

 hop-yards and the gardens, of Kent. But nothing pleased 

 him more than the prettiness of the wayside cottage, clothed 

 with the Honeysuckle and the China Rose, and fragrant 

 with Sweet-Brier, Wallflower, Clove, and Stock. 



I may not urge the restoration of this village beauty to 

 the modern Rose-garden, but in the mixed garden and in 

 the shrubbery the constant brave '' old Monthly," the last 

 to yield in winter, the first to bloom in spring, is still de- 

 serving of a place. He, at all events, is no more a Rosarian 

 who sees no beauty in this Rose, than he a florist who does 



