6 
THE FLORIST’S JOURNAL. 
truth ;—having done this, we think it is high time that we should 
speak a few words respecting those to whose skill and attention 
we are more immediately indebted for those beauties, and the 
pure, exquisite, softening, and refining pleasure, which we derive 
from the contemplation of them. It behoves us to hold the ba¬ 
lance of justice as evenly poised as we can ; and therefore, while 
we enjoy the gift, and call upon a willing world to participate with 
us in the enjoyment, we must not forget the giver. 
We have elsewhere endeavoured, in part at least, to show the 
beneficial effects which the love, the study, and the cultivation 
and improvement of flowers and ornamental plants, have already 
had, and are calculated still further to have, upon the minds and 
morals of all ranks and classes in society ; and we hesitate not to 
say, for we know we could prove, that, in the present state of the 
country, an indifference to flowers is one of the most unequivocal 
proofs of a rude and semi-barbaric mind. In less intellectual 
states of society, keen observers have asserted, and that with no 
small degree of apparent truth, that upon the great mass of the 
people, music has more influence than moral harangues, and 
ballads more than legislative enactments. This may be the case, 
in the first attempts to elevate mankind from the grossness of low 
sensuality. But these matters go only a very little way ; and 
they cannot, in the very nature of things, go far. For, though 
the gratification which they afford is refined, and certainly supe¬ 
rior to that of those merely animal appetites which the brutes 
possess and enjoy in an equal degree with ourselves, and often in 
a higher ; yet still, refined as these maybe, they are only sensual, 
—they excite no train of thought, they lead to no knowledge, 
they leave nothing upon which the mind can riot in activity and 
delight, after the music has ceased, and the ballad is at an end. 
It is an old and a true saying, of “ the song of one who hath a 
pleasant voice, or of one who playeth skilfully upon an instru¬ 
ment,” that, after hearing the sound, men go forth, and 
“ straightway it is forgotten.” There is nothing mental in it ; 
and therefore it cannot satisfy the enlightened mind. This, by 
the way, is the reason why the theatres have been nearly aban¬ 
doned by all save the vulgar and the profligate ; and nothing can 
restore them to the rank which they once held, but a revulsion of 
society backward to a state more allied to semi-barbarism. They 
complain that there is a want of talent ; but the country never 
