Hi.] AND GREEN-HOUSES. 59 



are to be propagated, reared and managed ; will be spoken of 

 under the head' of Vines, and under those of the several plants 

 and flowers ; but I cannot conclude this Chapter without ob- 

 serving that it is the moral effects naturally attending a green- 

 house that I set the most value upon. I will not, with Lord 

 Bacon, praise pursuits like these, because God Almighty first 

 planted a garden nor with Cowley, beca.use a Garden is 

 like Heaven nor with Addison, because a Garden was the 

 habitation of our first parents before their fall ; " all which is rather 

 far-fetched, and puts one in mind of the dispute between the gar- 

 deners and the tailors, as to the antiquity of their respective 

 callings ] the former contending that the planting of the garden 

 took place before the sewing of the fig-leaves together ; and the 

 latter contending that there was no gardening at all till Adam 

 was expelled, and compelled to work ; but, that the sewing was a 

 real and bona fide act of tailoring. This, to be sure, is vulgar 

 and grovelling work ; but who can blame such persons when 

 they have Lord Bacon to furnish them with a precedent ! I like, 

 a" great deal better, than these writers, Sir William Temple, 

 who, while he was a man of the soundest judgment, employed 

 in some of the greatest concerns of his country, so ardently and 

 yet so rationally and unaffectedly praises the pursuits of gardening, 

 in which he delighted from his youth to his old age ; and of his 

 taste in which he gave such delightful proofs in those gardens 

 and grounds at Moor Park in Surrey, beneath the turf of one 

 spot of which he caused, by his will, his heart to be buried, and 

 which spot, together with all the rest of the beautiful arrange- 

 ment, has been torn about and disfigured within the last fifty 

 years by a succession of wine-merchants, spirit-merchants, West 

 Indians, and God knows what besides : I like a great deal bet- 

 ter the sentiments of this really wise and excellent man ; but I 

 look still further as to effects. There must be amusements in 

 every family. Children observe and follow their parents in almost 

 everything. How much better, during a long and dreary winter, 

 for daughters, and even sons, to assist, or attend, their mother, in 

 a green-house, than to be seated with her at cards, or in the 

 bliibberings over a stupid novel, or at any other amusement 

 that can possibly be conceived ! How much more innocent, more 

 pleasant, more free from temptation to evil, this amusement, 

 than any other ! How much more instructive, too ! Beivl the 



