little time, skill or taste upon the flower-garden.  Even their love of nature, though thoroughly genuine as far as it went, did not imply that minute and exact knowledge of her charms which characterizes some of our best British poets.  They had no Thompson or Cowper.  Their country seats were richer in architectural than floral beauty.  Tully’s Tuscan Villa, so fondly and minutely described by the proprietor himself, would appear to little advantage in the eyes of a true worshipper of Flora, if compared with Pope’s retreat at Twickenham.  The ancients had a taste for the rural, not for the gardenesque, nor perhaps even for the picturesque.  The English have a taste for all three.  Hence they have good landscape-gardeners and first-rate landscape-painters.  The old Romans had neither.  But though, some of our Spitalfields weavers have shown a deeper love, and perhaps even a finer taste, for flowers, than were exhibited by the citizens of Rome, abundant evidence is furnished to us by the poets in all ages and in all countries that nature, in some form or another has ever charmed the eye and the heart of man.  The following version of a famous passage in Virgil, especially the lines in Italics, may give the English reader some idea of a Roman’s dream of

RURAL HAPPINESS.

Ah! happy Swains! if they their bliss but knew, Whom, far from boisterous war, Earth’s bosom true With easy food supplies.  If they behold No lofty dome its gorgeous gates unfold And pour at morn from all its chambers wide Of flattering visitants the mighty tide; Nor gaze on beauteous columns richly wrought, Or tissued robes, or busts from Corinth brought; Nor their white wool with Tyrian poison soil, Nor taint with Cassia’s bark their native oil; Yet peace is theirs; a life true bliss that yields; And various wealth; leisure mid ample fields, Grottoes, and living lakes, and vallies green, And lowing herds; and ’neath a sylvan screen, Delicious slumbers.  There the lawn and cave With beasts of chase abound. The young ne’er crave A prouder lot; their patient toil is cheered; Their Gods are worshipped and their sires revered; And there when Justice passed from earth away She left the latest traces of her sway.

D.L.R.

Lord Bacon was perhaps the first Englishman who endeavored to reform the old system of English gardening, and to show that it was contrary to good taste and an insult to nature.  “As for making knots or figures,” he says, “with divers colored earths, that may lie under the windows of the house on that side on which the garden stands, they be but toys:  you may see as good sights many times in tarts.”  Bacon here alludes, I suppose, to the old Dutch fashion of dividing flowerbeds into many compartments, and instead of filling them with flowers, covering one with red brick dust, another with charcoal, a third with yellow sand, a fourth with chalk, a fifth with broken China, and others with green glass, or with spars and ores.  But Milton, in his exquisite description of the garden of Eden, does not allude to the same absurd fashion when he speaks of “curious knots,”