OCTOBER. 



445 



of maturity, which no artificial process can retain. A peck 

 of apples kept in a box or upon a shelf in a fruit-room, would 

 lose their flavor almost as readily as the pear ; this we have 

 proved in our attempt to keep a small quantity of some late 

 sorts. In fact, there is no difference in regard to the mode of 

 keeping the two fruits. 



The whole secret, then, of keeping the pear is to preserve 

 them in barrels ; if the quantities are small, let them be put 

 together, with the simple separation of a double sheet of clean 

 thick brown paper. If the selection of sorts which ripen at the 

 same time is judiciously made, they may all be taken out at 

 once, ripened up in a slightly higher temperature, and produced 

 in all their beauty and excellence. Whoever has hesitated 

 about growing the winter pears on account of the difficulty 

 of ripening, may dispel their fears, if they will try the simple 

 method we have detailed to keep them. 



THE LITERATURE OF GARDENING. 



BY WILSON FLAGG. 



No. VIII. Mason's English Garden. 



The " English Garden," a poem by the Rev. William Ma- 

 son, published in 1772, is a work which has been greatly 

 admired, and extolled beyond its merits as a poem, by many 

 who were pleased with its precepts as a treatise on the art of 

 ornamental gardening. It is a didactic poem, in blank verse, 

 and a professed imitation of the Georgics of Virgil. Its ob- 

 ject is to apply the "rules of imitative art to real nature, and 

 by proper selections and agreeable combinations in the rela- 

 tive position of hedges, buildings, trees and water ; by an 

 accurate arrangement of lands, in reference to hills, valleys 

 and plains, to produce beautiful and picturesque scenery ; an 

 art but little known in Greece and Rome, and in which the 

 English have surpassed all modern nations." As a more ap- 

 propriate title for the work, that of English Landscape 



