Fl&mers and Fruit. 231 



who bring the flower into a lovelier bloom, and the fruit tree 

 into richer fruit, deserve to be numbered with men who aid in 

 fulfiUing the intentions of Providence, and who, in the words of 

 one of our latter poets, may be said to 



" Walk hand in hand with God." 



Much, however. Sir, as I reverence them, I cannot refrain from 

 accusing them in my heart of having allowed some of the 

 pleasant fruits which cheered me in youth to die away and 

 become extinct. When I wander now among the orchards and 

 gardens, and am requested to examine and to taste some newly 

 discovered apple or competition pear, I sigh, as my teeth sink 

 into them, for beloved fruits of the year 1784, and say, with 

 some bitterness of spirit, what are these compared to the pear 

 Robert, and, more savoury still, the true honey pear, to which 

 the pastoral bard compared his mistress's lips, — 



" And oh, her mouth's like ony honey pear ! " 



But what I miss most is the glorious golden pippin; the Howard 

 and Percy both of the whole peerage of British fruit. Gar- 

 deners, indeed, on asking for a golden pippin, will bring you 

 one ; but they bring it with a conscious look of imposition ; and 

 when they place the grey and unsavoury morsel before you, 

 they complain of the season, and blame the cold or the drought 

 for its dejected looks. But he who has seen golden pippins 

 grow in the year 1 YS-i, and remembers the trees glittering with 

 their golden and savoury loads, must sigh for the pippin of 

 these degenerate times. Other fruits, now no more, rise on my 

 remembrance as I write. When some of your corresponding- 

 gardeners have informed me where the honey pear and the 

 golden pippin are fled to, I shall, it is likely, request information 

 regarding others of their less distinguished, though scarcely less 

 luscious, compeers, which flourished in my boyish days in the 

 orchards of the north. 



If I feel disposed to question and rebuke the brethren of the 

 spade and pruning-knife, for having allowed those fine fruits to 

 perish through carelessness or neglect, I feel a desire equally 

 strong to praise them for the improvements which they have 

 made, in forcing this cold and sterile climate to furnish us with 

 fruits and with flowers of foreign descent. Look at the heated 

 walls of other days, and compare them and their productions 

 with the graperies of the present time. In the former, flues 

 were constructed along; the heart of the garden wall, throush 

 which a volume of warm smoke circulated, diffusing an unequal 

 heat, and producing bunches of grapes little larger than sloes, 

 and scarcely so savoury j in the latter, hot water flows freely in 



