PREFACE. 
IX 
In treating of so gay a subject, we will 
not make a parade of our learning, to tell our 
fair readers what fine things Pliny has said 
upon it; or, in the spirit of prosing, write a 
crabbed treatise upon the Egyptian hiero¬ 
glyphics. We will even spare them a dis¬ 
sertation upon the Floral Alphabet of the 
effeminate Chinese; they had, and have, 
their flowers and their feelings, their emblems 
and their ecstacies. Let them enjoy them. 
We shall do no more than rove through the 
European Garden, to cull its beauties, to ar¬ 
range them into odoriferous significance, and 
to teach our refined and purifying science to 
those fair beings, the symbols of whose 
mortal beauty are but inadequately found in 
the most glorious flowers, and whose mental 
