xvi PREFACE. 



entitled The Garden. Gessner also is represented as of a 

 kindred sweetness of nature. They all worked in their own 

 gardens, and with enthusiastic pleasure. 



Barclay, the author of the Argenis, rented a house near 

 the Vatican, in Rome, with a garden in which he planted 

 the choicest flowers, principally such as grow from bulbs, 

 which had never been seen in Rome before. He was ex- 

 tremely fond of flowers, particularly of the bulbous kind, 

 which are prized chiefly for their colours, and purchased 

 the bulbs at a high price*. 



Pope had the same taste, and was assisted in his horti- 

 cultural amusements by Lord Peterborough. One of the 

 most interesting descriptions of him represents him as being 

 seen before dinner in a small suit of black, very neat an'd 

 gentlemanly, with a basket in his hand containing flowers 

 for the Miss Blounts. Rousseau, who has written some in- 

 teresting Letters on Botany, of which among his other 

 accomplishments he was master, found friends in the 

 flowers, when he thought he had no others. Even his 

 great rival Voltaire, who if he had more wit had much less 

 sentiment, soothed his irritability and cherished his bene- 

 volence in his garden ; and one, " greater than he," and 

 whom I mention in the same page with any thing but an 

 irreverent or unchristian feeling, said the noblest thing 

 of a flower that ever was uttered : " Behold the lilies 

 of the field, how they grow : they toil not, neither do they 

 spin ; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon, in all his 

 glory, was not arrayed like one of these." (Matthew, chap, 

 vi. v. 28, 29 f.) How surely would Solomon himself have 



* See Beckmann's History of Inventions, vol. i. 



t Some have supposed that the flower to which Jesus alluded must 

 have been the Tulip ; as if it were necessary for it to be really gaudy 

 or gorgeous before it could be set above the splendour of royalty ! This 

 may be called the art of divesting sentiment of its sentiment. 



