62 IN A GLOUCESTERSHIRE GARDEN 



lily and the rose. Herrick indeed was bold enough 

 to compare his mistress to a tulip, but it was only 

 to point the moral that life and beauty soon pass 

 away ; and I know of no other author who has made 

 the tulip his subject except Steele, who, in a charm- 

 ing paper in the Taller (No. 228), has a good- 

 humoured laugh against the absurd names given to 

 tulips, and congratulated himself that he * had never 

 fallen into any of these fantastical tastes/ but, * look- 

 ing upon the whole country in spring-time as a 

 spacious garden/ could thank 'the bounty of Pro- 

 vidence, which has made the most pleasing and most 

 beautiful objects the most ordinary and most common.' 

 But with the gardening writers the praises of the 

 tulip are absurdly fulsome and extravagant. Each 

 writer tries to outdo the others in his superlatives, 

 and I have no room for their praises. One specimen 

 will suffice, and I choose it because the writer, Francis 

 Pomey, a Jesuit of the early part of the seventeenth 

 century, is little known, and I quote from Hoffmann : 



1 Tulipa, in regno florum, coronam sibi iure vindicat. Huic 

 uni concessit natura, ut quidquid Tenustatis et gratia? aliis 

 tributum dispersumque est, ipsa in se colligat.' 



There is much more to the same effect, but that is 

 enough, for I want to say something about a very 



