1/8 A BOOK ABOUT ROSES 



or, rather, called Perpetuals by courtesy, seeing that 

 many of them score 0 in their second innings, and 

 but few resume their former glory in autumn. They 

 are, nevertheless, as superior for the most part in 

 endurance as in quality to the summer Roses, and 

 they supply an abundance of the most beautiful varie- 

 ties both for the purpose now under consideration, the 

 general ornamentation of the Rosary, and for public 

 exhibition. 



Before we skim their cream as garden Roses, let us 

 remember with admiration the ancestral cow. For 

 who shall despise those old China Roses, which have 

 brightened, more than any other flower, our English 

 homes, smiling through our cold and sunless days like 

 the brother born for adversity, and winning from the 

 foreigner, as much perhaps as any of our graces, this 

 frequent praise, *Your land is the garden of the 

 world ' ! The Frenchman, for example, as I can 

 remember him in my boyhood, who had been travel- 

 ling on the straight, flat, hedgeless, turfless roads of 

 France, in a torpid, torrid, dusty diligence, was in an 

 ecstasy as he sat upon the Dover Mail, and went 

 smoothly and cheerily, ten miles per hour, through 

 the meadows and the orchards, the hop-yards and the 

 gardens of Kent. But nothing pleased him more 

 than the prettiness of the wayside cottage, clothed 

 with the Honeysuckle, the Jasmine, and the China 



