THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE BULB GARDENS 85 



stepped in and put an end to the gamble. Now, 

 though these two historic names are still known 

 and the bulbs still grown, neither flower is of great 

 repute for beauty, and, generally speaking, neither 

 would be so much admired as the self-coloured 

 sorts — the scarlet Gesneriana spathulata, with its 

 intense blue-black centre, the snow-white Dora, or 

 even the insignificant little red flower, for a single 

 bulb of which eight guineas was asked in London 

 not many years ago. Asked and readily paid too ; 

 from which, one may conclude, the real tulip 

 mania is not quite dead, though, of course, the 

 price is a mere trifle compared to those paid in 

 the early eighteenth century, or even as late as 

 the beginning of the nineteenth, when, it is re- 

 ported, a florist of Amsterdam paid £640 for the 

 bulb of a new species, The Citadel of Antwerp. 

 This last man must have been either a cultivator 

 or a collector buying for the sake of having the 

 bulb, for by then the gamble, which largely made 

 the great mania what it was, had long passed away. 

 When the mania was at its height men obviously 

 did not buy for that reason. The madness, which 

 then inexplicably affected so large a part of the 

 steady Dutch nation, was more nearly related to 

 a Stock Exchange gamble than a collector's craze ; 



