[121] Pope in his well known paper in the Guardian complains that a citizen is no sooner proprietor of a couple of yews but he entertains thoughts of erecting them into giants, like those of Guildhall.  “I know an eminent cook,” continues the writer, “who beautified his country seat with a coronation dinner in greens, where you see the Champion flourishing on horseback at one end of the table and the Queen in perpetual youth at the other.”

When the desire to subject nature to art had been carried to the ludicrous extravagances so well satirized by Pope, men rushed into an opposite extreme.  Uvedale Price in his first rage for nature and horror of art, destroyed a venerable old garden that should have been respected for its antiquity, if for nothing else.  He lived to repent his rashness and honestly to record that repentance.  Coleridge, observed to John Sterling, that “we have gone too far in destroying the old style of gardens and parks.”  “The great thing in landscape gardening” he continued “is to discover whether the scenery is such that the country seems to belong to man or man to the country.”

[122] In England it costs upon the average about 12 shillings or six rupees to have a tree of 30 feet high transplanted.

[123] I believe the largest leaf in the world is that of the Fan Palm or Talipot tree in Ceylon.  “The branch of the tree,” observes the author of Sylvan Sketches, “is not remarkably large, but it bears a leaf large enough to cover twenty men.  It will fold into a fan and is then no bigger than a man’s arm.”

[124] Southey’s Common-Place Book.

[125] The height of a full grown banyan may be from sixty to eighty feet; and many of them, I am fully confident, cover at least two acres.—­Oriental Field Sports.

There is a banyan tree about five and twenty miles from Berhampore, remarkable for the height of the lower branches from the ground.  A man standing up on the houdah of an elephant may pass under it without touching the foliage.

A tree has been described as growing in China of a size so prodigious that one branch of it only will so completely cover two hundred sheep that they cannot be perceived by those who approach the tree, and another so enormous that eighty persons can scarcely embrace the trunk.—­Sylvan Sketches.

[126] This praise is a little extravagant, but the garden is really very tastefully laid out, and ought to furnish a useful model to such of the people of this city as have spacious grounds.  The area of the garden is about two hundred and fifty nine acres.  This garden was commenced in 1768 by Colonel Kyd.  It then passed to the care of Dr. Roxburgh, who remained in charge of it from 1793 to the date of his death 1813.

[127] Alphonse Karr, bitterly ridicules the Botanical Savants with their barbarous nomenclature.  He speaks of their mesocarps and quinqueloculars infundibuliform, squammiflora, guttiferas monocotyledous &c. &c. with supreme disgust.  Our English poet, Wordsworth, also used to complain that some of our familiar English names of flowers, names so full of delightful associations, were beginning to be exchanged even in common conversation for the coldest and harshest scientific terms.