DECEMBER. 367 | 
always pure’’ (he might, have been. describing a Rose), this Guide to. 
Amateurs, which has brought so much happiness. to, the..neophyte,, so, 
much instruction to, the learner, so many glad memories and_ genial 
sympathies to all Rose growers, quite completed my conversion. In that 
pleasant .manual there is a hearty, loyal fondness for the theme, a 
truthtulness of description, which cannot fail to charm. It seems to 
Say, with the perfumed earth in the Persian fable, “‘I am not the Rose, 
but cherish me, for we have dwelt together ;” and there is fragrance as 
of Roses among its leaves. There can hardly be a treatise with less 
affectation and superfluity, so genuine, explicit, and natural, so exact a 
transcript of the mental man, from whom it comes, that when I made 
his acquaintance, some years after my transformation, he exactly veri- 
ay | hy expectations, and it was like meeting with an old and valued’ 
riend. | 
And thus I discovered, if not ‘* books in the running brooks,” a most 
fascinating volume in the Rivers of Hertfordshire, and in I plunged, as 
keen as Cassius (to Ceesar’s unspeakable disgust) and as eagerly as a 
hot. schoolboy, taking “a header” into his favorite pool, truant, it may 
be, and destined after his ablutions to the coarsest kind of towelling, but 
for the time as oblivious of all the ills, which the fleshier part of youth 
is heir to, as though he bathed in Lethe. And just as this amphibious © 
juvenile will emerge from time to time and diversify his sport by a 
periodical canter in the flowery mead, so I quitted my Rivers at inter~ 
vals, and wandering among my Roses (I had but a dozen then) ten- 
dered my tardy but devoted allegiance.’ Or as a pupil at Dotheboys 
Hall would be' requested, after spelling the word horse, to go and clean 
the quadruped in question, so I went from description to reality, first 
studying the portraits in my Book of Beauty, and then doing homage 
to those fair’ originals, born, or rather budded, so long to blush unseen,” 
and-waste their sweetness on my father’s heir. - How delighted I was,~ 
first.to read, and'then to have ocular proof, that Boula de Nanteuil was 
a ‘*standard of excellence’ (mine was only a half-standard, but let that 
pass) 3: that Kean was “always: beautiful, in’ size first-rate, and in 
shape perfection” (Mrs. Kean herself*could not wish for a more flatter- 
ing portrait); that Coupe d’ Hebé was ‘ the gem of the family,” and 
there; sure ‘enough, I found her, a cup for the gods and jewelled with 
_ dewdrops; ‘and how disappointed I felt as I read that Madame 
Laffay “ ought to bein every garden,” but could not find her in» 
mine, soon’ consoling myself, however, in the presence of Baronne 
Prevost and Duchess of Sutherland, and, on the whole, as well pleased 
with my new friends as was the author of my book when, one morning 
in June, looking over the first bed of Roses he had ever raised from 
seed, he saw growing with great vigour one of the very very few. good : 
Roses ever originated in England, our climate bemg as you know un- 
toward for the sufficient ripening of the seed, and subsequently called, 
perhaps because robust in habit as poor Brummel’s ‘fat friend,” 
Rivers’s George the Fourth. | 
If this account of my resuscitation, if the suddenness with which I 
cracked the cocoon of my Rose-hating grubship and came out a Rose- 
loving butterfly, appear to any of my hearers to be too severe a test of 
