182 



NOTICES OF AUTHORS. 



plants refused to grow, excepting in some rare spots, 

 and a few general stragglers. Then how the natu- 

 ral richness of the soil threw up such a flush of vege- 

 tation — of grass, and herhs, and shruhs, that most of 

 these plants were buried under this luxuriance ; and 

 how the mice and the emmets, and other wayfarers, 

 hearing, by the bruit of fame, of the wise men who 

 had the governing of Dean, assembled from the ut- 

 termost ends of the island, expecting a millennium in 

 the forest, and ate up almost every plant which had 

 survived the smothering. Now, this is w^ell ; we re- 

 joice over the natm-al justice of the native and legi- 

 timate inhabitants of the Royal Domain, the weeds 

 mastering the invaders the plants, who, year after 

 year, to the amount of many millions, made hostile 

 entrance into the forest. We only deplore the cruel 

 doom of the mice, on whose heads a price was laid, 

 and of the emmets, who, acting as allies of the native 

 powers, merited a better fate than indiscriminate 

 slaughter. 



May we hope that our Government will no longer 

 persist in unprofitable endeavom*s to turn cultivator, 

 or to raise its own supply ? We laugh at the Pasha 

 of Egypt becoming cotton-planter and merchant 

 himself, in a country where the exertions of a man 

 enlightened beyond his subjects, who has influence 



