254* OUR COMMON EETTITS. 



duced for which this honour is claimed. It is stated to 

 have been grown in the garden of Sir Matthew Decker, 

 at Richmond, where fruit-bearing Ananas were certainly 

 to be seen flourishing in 1726. Ten years before this 

 date, Lady Mary Montague had recorded in one of her 

 lively letters her introduction, at the dessert-table of the 

 Elector of Hanover, to this noble fruit, but the allega- 

 tion, often repeated by careless writers, that she had 

 never even heard of such a thing before, is an error pal- 

 pable enough to any one taking the trouble of referring 

 to her own words on the occasion. After expressing her 

 surprise at the superiority in number and beauty of the 

 orange-trees in the garden at Herrnhausen to any she 

 had seen in England, she continues : " But I had more 

 reason to wonder that night, at the royal table, to see a 

 present from a gentleman of this country of two large 

 baskets full of ripe oranges and lemons of different sorts, 

 many of which were quite new to me ; and, what I thought 

 worth all the rest, two ripe Ananasses, which to my taste 

 are a fruit perfectly delicious. You know they are na- 

 turally the growth of Brazil, and I could not imagine 

 how they came here, but by enchantment. Upon inquiry, 

 I learnt that they have brought their stoves to such per- 

 fection they lengthen their summer as long as they please, 

 giving to every plant the degree of heat it would receive 

 from the sun in its native soil. The effect is very near 

 the same, and I am surprised we do not practise in England 

 so useful an invention." The deficiency was soon sup- 

 plied, for by 1730 pine-stoves were established in all the 

 principal gardens of Europe. Many, however, were ca- 

 pable of appreciating pine-apples who were quite unable 

 to indulge in a luxury so costly as these stove-grown 

 nurslings of art, and an effort was therefore made to ex- 

 tend their importation, for a pine might be bought in the 

 "West Indies for sixpence which costs the English grower 

 almost as many pounds. Phillips, writing in 1821, men- 

 tions that even while his pages were in progress the fruit 

 had just been imported, for the first time, as an article of 

 commerce, from the Bermuda Islands, the consignment 

 consisting of about 400 ; and the Oxford Street fruiterer 



