'QUARTERLY REVIEW 285 



above, while every breath from beneath wafts up the perfumed 



air, 



' Stealing and giving odour,' 



is one of the greatest luxuries I have in life. The Poetry of 

 Gardening}- 



HPHE amateur who, happening to have a sufficiency of land ' QUARTERLY 



attached to his residence, chooses himself to take the com- 

 mand of two or three labourers, instead of employing a trained 

 professional at a high salary (wages might be offensive) is of 

 compulsion the most assiduous student of garden literature. His 

 practice will be adapted to various ends, according as utility or 

 ornament is the object the more desirable in his state of affairs. 

 But his horticulture is mostly of the composite order; he cultivates 

 a garden-of-all-work. As the celebrated cobbler * lived in a stall 

 that served him for parlour and kitchen and all,' so the inde- 

 pendent manager arranges a plot of ground so as to comprise the 

 conveniences of orchard, kitchen-garden, shrubbery, parterre, and 

 terrace. And a capital school it is for the men and boys who are 

 wise enough to look after instruction while working in it. How 

 well, too, an avenue of standard perpetual roses harmonizes with 

 the line of a feathery asparagus bed ! How little there is to 

 displease in a rectangular strawberry-ground enclosed in a frame- 

 work of brilliant low-growing flowers, with an outer fillet of box, 

 having openings left, like the gates of a Roman camp, for the 

 approach of the workmen and the fruit-gatherers ! What pleasant 

 strolls may be taken in a wilderness of apple, bullace, cherry, 

 plum, filbert, and medlar-trees, with an underwood of the peri- 

 winkles, great and small, honesty, and primroses, and with one 

 path at least skirting the edge of the fish-pond, from which a pike 

 for dinner may always be had. His visitors enjoy the combination 



1 This essay, together with another one by the same writer, which originally 

 appeared in the Quarterly Review, 1842, was reprinted by Murray in 1852, in 

 one of the little volumes of his ' Reading for the Rail,' under the title of 

 'The Flower-Garden.' 



