MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. 



xxi 



— " I cannot flatter myself that any thing I have said can 

 be very interesting to yon. Most of my neighbours go to 

 work in the barbarous old way of lopping, and topping, 

 and planting many deformed and maimed pollards by way 

 of beauty, on which subject, I cry like Wisdom in the high- 

 ways, and am not regarded. I would rather have a 

 decayed tree, than a deficient one ; as some beau said he 

 would choose rather to have a hole in his stocking than a 

 darn ; the one might be negligence, the other inforcjd 

 premeditated and confessed poverty. I am happy to 

 think that your discoveries may prevent botli extremities, 

 and am, dear Sir Henry, your obliged humble servant, 



"Walter Scott.'' 



"Edinburgh, 23£^ February 1823." 



However much Sir Henry and Sir Walter Scott 

 agreed in the main, they difl'ered slightly in some points 

 both in the theory and practice of transplanting, as is 

 evident from some of the statements in an essay on 

 the planting of waste lands, by Sir Walter, which 

 appeared in the seventy-second number of the Quarterly 

 Review. In the notes towards the close of the Second 

 Edition of the " Planter's Guide,"when defending Sir Walter 

 against some attacks that had been made upon him by 

 Mr Withers, Sir Henry, however, describes this essay as, 

 "independently of its other merits, one of the most 

 powerful, judicious, and useful practical tracts existing in 

 the language. From the singularly rapid way," he adds, 

 " in which the great author is known to write, and from 

 the circumstance of his professing no accurate knowledge 

 of phytology, it cannot seem wonderful that some errors, 

 both in the theory and the practice, should have crept into 

 the essay." Besides any slight differences of opinion on 

 the subject of transplanting, between these two practical 



