378 MORE POT-POURRI 



growing plants they must be fed, and in a shrubbery in 

 this soil they would hardly make healthy leaves. 



The shrubberies round about the villas in the 

 neighbourhood of Geneva were quite as badly pruned 

 often all on one side, and as much choked up as ours 

 in England, or more so. All that the inhabitants seem to 

 care for is what makes dense shade, which of course they 

 need more than we do. A large Privet, called Ligustrum 

 sinense, was flowering very well, and is effective and worth 

 growing in villa gardens, in spite of its rather disagree- 

 able smell. It is a good flowerer in July, a rare quality 

 among shrubs. 



July 8th. I carried out my wish and remained a 

 night at Bale, resisting the greater convenience of the 

 station hotel for the old, famous, and handsomely re- 

 built post-house of ' The Three Kings,' with its balconies 

 over the rushing, splendid Ehine. To the ignorant this 

 river looks as if its water-power were stupendous ; as a 

 fact it cannot even be used to make the electric light for 

 the town, the level of the river varies so immensely. 



Time was short and the weather wet, so I only saw 

 the museum or picture gallery, which was what I had 

 come to see. Bale to me meant two things Erasmus 

 and Boecklin. It was at Bale that Erasmus lived and 

 died. Froude's lectures on 'The Life and Letters of 

 Erasmus ' had so recently brought that memorable time 

 vividly before me ; and they enable us to look ' through 

 the eyes of Erasmus at all events as they rose, with the 

 future course of things concealed from him. This is the 

 way to understand history. We know what happened, 

 and we judge the actors on the stage by the light of it. 

 They did not know.' Holbein's portrait of Erasmus is 

 intensely interesting, and much more beautiful than 

 the one at Hampton Court, by the same painter, of 

 this thin-lipped, intellectual, sensitive ' Trimmer ' of the 



