260 Mr. Lunfs Address. 



palaces are but gross handy-works ; and a man shall ever see, that, when 

 ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately, sooner than 

 to garden finely ; as if gardening were the greater perfection.' 



There can be, indeed, no question whatever that Horticulture, as a sci- 

 entific pursuit, is of very recent date. The most famous gardens of an- 

 tiquity, we may be sure, could enter into no sort of comparison with those 

 which would now be considered as exhibiting the most moderate pretensions 

 in point of the variety and beauty of their productions. The hanging gar- 

 dens of Semiramis have been accounted amongst the wonders of the world. 

 Yet nothing can be more certain than that the ' Beauty of the Chaldee's 

 excellency' could afford the royal mistress of Assyria not a single nosegay 

 to be compared with the meanest of those, which constantly grace your el- 

 egant and spirited exhibitions. Were it not for the apparent necessity of 

 the case, arising from the absence of intercommunication between different 

 people, it would be unaccountable how little progress was made, for long 

 ages, in an art so eminently attractive in itself, and so universally interest- 

 ing to mankind. It is true, that conquerors, at all periods of time, have 

 traversed vast portions of the world. But, with the exception of the em- 

 peror Napoleon, the pursuits of science, or the advancement of society, 

 have rarely entered into their schemes of personal or national aggrandize- 

 ment. But what vast improvements in this, as in other respects, have re- 

 sulted from the extending commerce of the world ! Of all the countless 

 profusion of fruits and vegetables which make the fertile face of England 

 ' as the garden of the Lord,' those indigenous to her soil are of the most 

 insignificant description. Few even of those sweetest flowers, which her 

 later poets have woven into many a golden song, are of her own original 

 production. The oak, and some of the more common forest trees, were all 

 that her Druid groves could boast. The very mulberry of Shakspeare was, 

 in his day, a rare exotic, and one of a large importation procured from the 

 continent by King James, in 1606. And if, as we are told, in the times of 

 Henry VH, apples were sold at one and two shillings each, the red ones 

 bringing the best price, we may conclude, that when Justice Shallow treat- 

 ed Falstaff to a last year''s -pippin of his oivn graffing, it might be an enter- 

 tainment, at least, commensurate with the dignity of such a guest. 



It has been recently stated, that the average value of the plants in a sin- 

 gle horticultural establishment of London, is estimated at a million of dol- 

 lars. And oh, before this magnificent result had been reached, from the 

 comparatively trifling beginning of a ievt centuries ago, what infinite care 

 and cost must have been expended ; what love for the generous science 

 must have been fostered and encouraged ; what distant and unknown re- 

 gions had been visited and lifled of the glories of the plains and woods ! 

 From solitary Lybian wastes and those paradises of Persia, the Land of 

 Roses, so eloquently described by Xenophon ; from 



Isles that crown th' ^gean deep, 



to the boundless expanse of this bright heritage of ours ; from Tartarian 

 deserts to prairies of perpetual bloom ; from the fertile breadth of fields, 



