and destroyed the whole plantation, so disgusted him with the place, that he razed to the ground the house which had cost him L8,000, and left the country.  He then purchased a beautiful estate in Italy, which is still in possession of his family.  He himself has long since returned to his native land.  Landor loves Italy, but he loves England better.  In one of his Imaginary Conversations he tells an Italian nobleman: 

“The English are more zealous of introducing new fruits, shrubs and plants, than other nations; you Italians are less so than any civilized one.  Better fruit is eaten in Scotland than in the most fertile and cultivated parts of your peninsula. As for flowers, there is a greater variety in the worst of our fields than in the best of your gardens. As for shrubs, I have rarely seen a lilac, a laburnum, a mezereon, in any of them, and yet they flourish before almost every cottage in our poorest villages.”

“We wonder in England, when we hear it related by travellers, that peaches in Italy are left under the trees for swine; but, when we ourselves come into the country, our wonder is rather that the swine do not leave them for animals less nice.”

Landor acknowledges that he has eaten better pears and cherries in Italy than in England, but that all the other kinds of fruitage in Italy appeared to him unfit for dessert.

The most celebrated of the private estates of the present day in England is Chatsworth, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire.  The mansion, called the Palace of the Peak, is considered one of the most splendid residences in the land.  The grounds are truly beautiful and most carefully attended to.  The elaborate waterworks are perhaps not in the severest taste.  Some of them are but costly puerilities.  There is a water-work in the form of a tree that sends a shower from every branch on the unwary visitor, and there are snakes that spit forth jets upon him as he retires.  This is silly trifling:  but ill adapted to interest those who have passed their teens; and not at all an agreeable sort of hospitality in a climate like that of England.  It is in the style of the water-works at Versailles, where wooden soldiers shoot from their muskets vollies of water at the spectators.[032]

It was an old English custom on certain occasions to sprinkle water over the company at a grand entertainment.  Bacon, in his Essay on Masques, seems to object to getting drenched, when he observes that “some sweet odours suddenly coming forth, without any drops falling, are in such a company as there is steam and heat, things of great pleasure and refreshment.”  It was a custom also of the ancient Greeks and Romans to sprinkle their guests with fragrant waters.  The Gascons had once the same taste:  “At times,” says Montaigne, “from the bottom of the stage, they caused sweet-scented waters to spout upwards and dart their thread to such a prodigious height, as to sprinkle and perfume the vast multitudes of spectators.”  The Native gentry of India always slightly sprinkle their visitors with rose-water.  It is flung from a small silver utensil tapering off into a sort of upright spout with a pierced top in the fashion of that part of a watering pot which English gardeners call the rose.