PREFACE. 



THE following pages apply only to those English 

 writers on gardening who are deceased. That there 

 have been portraits taken of some of those sixty-nine 

 English writers, whose names first occur in the fol- 

 lowing pages, there can be no doubt ; and those por- 

 traits may yet be with their surviving relatives or des- 

 cendants. I am not so presumptuous as to apply to 

 the following most slight memorials, some of which 

 relate to very obscure persons, who claimed neither 

 " the boast of heraldry, nor the pomp of power," but 

 whose 



useful toil, 



Their homely joys and destiny obscure 



benefited society by their honest labour ; I am not 

 so vain as to apply to these, any part of the high tes- 

 timony which Sir Walter Scott has so justly paid to 

 the merit of Mr. Lodge's truly splendid work of the 



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