384 Obituary. 



He then had began to write a General Treatise on Gardening, but the death 

 of his younger son, who was established on an extensive farm at Wood- 

 borough Hall, caused Mr. Speechly to leave Welbeck and go to that farm, 

 where he continued some years. During his residence there, he had the 

 misfortune to lose his elder son, who died at the extensive nursery grounds 

 of Withers and Speechly at Newark-upon-Trent. 



Mr. Speechly's intense genius had led him into a course of agricultural 

 experiments, on which he wrote several essays, and obtained the appro- 

 bation and honorary medal of the Board of Agriculture. After this he gave 

 up his farm, and retired to King's Newton Hall, in the proximity of which 

 the only surviving branch of his family then resided, and whose removal, 

 first to London, and then to a villa in Oxfordshire, caused Mr. Speechly 

 to remove to the same neighbourhood. He died at Great Milton on the 

 1st of October, 1819, in the 86th year of his age, surviving Mrs. Speechly 

 above two years. 



During the retirement of Mr. Speechly, he digested his essays, and 

 formed a small volume of Practical Hints in Domestic Rural Economy, a 

 work of merit and usefulness. 



Mr. Speechly was not a systematic botanist, but, as a kitchen, fruit, and 

 forcing gardener, he was exceeded by no man of his time. He was strictly 

 honest and honourable, modest, unassuming, cheerful, frugal, of domestic 

 habits, and, though a practical gardener, yet having the manners of a 

 gentleman. 



It was his good fortune to be in the employ of a family who ever were, 

 and still are, the most enlightened and liberal patrons of agriculture, gar- 

 dening, and planting. By the extracts from the Sloanean Manuscripts in 

 the British Museum, which are printed in the preface to the Hortus Kew- 

 ensis, p. xii., it appears that the extensive collection of plants at Kew 

 originated in a great measure in a gift from an ancestor of the present 

 Duke to the royal gardens at Hampton Court in 1690. 



It seems, by a letter and plan published in the second edition of the 

 Treatise on the Pine-apple, that a regular correspondence subsisted between 

 Mr. Speechly and his favourite pupil, Mr. Joseph Thompson, then gardener 

 to the late Lord John Cavendish, in Northamptonshire. When Mr. Speechly 

 left Welbeck in 1801, he recommended Mr. Thompson as his successor; 

 and the present state of the extensive forcing-houses, the botanical arrange- 

 ments, and the general improved state of Welbeck grounds, shows that 

 Mr. Speechly's confidence in his successor was by no means misplaced. — 

 H. A. S. August, 1826. 



Art. XI. Obituary. 



Died, at Mount Pleasance, near Dumfries, on the 22d of August, Mr. 

 W. Hood, nurseryman, in the 65th year of his age. The deceased was one 

 of those unobtrusive characters who require to be known, and that inti- 

 mately, before their moral qualities can be duly appreciated. But his worth 

 was sterling, notwithstanding; his feelings warm, affectionate, and friendly; 

 his charity and inoffensiveness alike proverbial ; and, without saying more, 

 his character may be summed up in the following expression, used and 

 responded to at his numerously attended and respectable funeral : Mr. 

 Hood, I am certain, never, to his knowledge, wronged a man of a penny, or 

 spoke an evil word of a single human being. {Dumfries Courier.) 



