[009] Ovid, in his story of Pyramus and Thisbe, tells us that the black Mulberry was originally white.  The two lovers killed themselves under a white Mulberry tree and the blood penetrating to the roots of the tree mixed with the sap and gave its color to the fruit.

[010] Revived Adonis,—­for, according to tradition he died every year and revived again. Alcinous, host of old Laertes’ son,—­that is, of Ulysses, whom he entertained on his return from Troy. Or that, not mystic—­not fabulous as the rest, but a real garden which Solomon made for his wife, the daughter of Pharoah, king of Egypt—­WARBURTON

“Divested of harmonious Greek and bewitching poetry,” observes Horace Walpole, “the garden of Alcinous was a small orchard and vineyard with some beds of herbs and two fountains that watered them, inclosed within a quickset hedge.”  Lord Kames, says, still more boldly, that it was nothing but a kitchen garden.  Certainly, gardening amongst the ancient Greeks, was a very simple business.  It is only within the present century that it has been any where elevated into a fine art.

[011] “We are unwilling to diminish or lose the credit of Paradise, or only pass it over with [the Hebrew word for] Eden, though the Greek be of a later name.  In this excepted, we know not whether the ancient gardens do equal those of late times, or those at present in Europe.  Of the gardens of Hesperides, we know nothing singular, but some golden apples.  Of Alcinous his garden, we read nothing beyond figs, apples, olives; if we allow it to be any more than a fiction of Homer, unhappily placed in Corfu, where the sterility of the soil makes men believe there was no such thing at all.  The gardens of Adonis were so empty that they afforded proverbial expression, and the principal part thereof was empty spaces, with herbs and flowers in pots.  I think we little understand the pensile gardens of Semiramis, which made one of the wonders of it [Babylon], wherein probably the structure exceeded the plants contained in them.  The excellency thereof was probably in the trees, and if the descension of the roots be equal to the height of trees, it was not [absurd] of Strebaeus to think the pillars were hollow that the roots might shoot into them.”—­Sir Thomas Browne.—­Bohn’s Edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, vol. 2, page 498.

[012] The house and garden before Pope died were large enough for their owner.  He was more than satisfied with them.  “As Pope advanced in years,” says Roscoe, “his love of gardening, and his attention to the various occupations to which it leads, seem to have increased also.  This predilection was not confined to the ornamental part of this delightful pursuit, in which he has given undoubted proofs of his proficiency, but extended to the useful as well as the agreeable, as appears from several passages in his poems; but he has entered more particularly into this subject in a letter to Swift (March 25,