INTRODUCTION. 



•• And let it appeare that he doth not change his Country Manners for 

 those of Forraigne Parts: But only prick in some Flowers of that he 

 hath Learned abroad into the Customes of his own country." 



Bacon's Essay on Travel. 



The success met with by my little book on French horticul- 

 ture led me to hope that a work describing the progress of 

 our neighbours in city improvements, and giving a detailed 

 account of the production of the more important fruits and 

 vegetables for the Paris market, might prove useful. Hence 

 the present volume. In my " Gleanings from French 

 Gardens," the question of public gardening was scarcely 

 alluded to ; in this book nearly one half is devoted to parks, 

 wide tree-planted roads, public gardens, squares, and similar 

 means of rendering great, ugly, gloomy, filthy human 

 hives fitter dwelling-places for vast hosts of men. A belief 

 that London may, without great sacrifice on our part, be 

 made the noblest city in the world — as fair and clean as 

 wide-spreading and wealthy — and the knowledge that the 

 system of public gardening now pursued by us is not the 

 one calculated to lead to this end, have induced me to give 

 the stay-at-home public, and especially that section of it 

 interested in city improvement, an idea of the efforts that 

 are being made in the capital of France to ameliorate the 

 conditions of life. 



There is no need to expatiate on the necessity of a 

 thoroughly good system of public gardening in the great 

 cities of a wealthy and civilized race; nor to describe the 

 want of it in our own case — this is painted but too plainly 

 on the faces of thousands in our densely-packed cities, in 



