This is one happy instance of an admirable situation, where Nature is modestly and judiciously improved, not hurt, by art.  An opposite instance of what art, skill, and taste may produce, without any particular advantages of ground or situation, is most agreeably displayed in the royal gardens at Kew.  There you find an extent of flat ground, so easily, agreeably, and unaffectedly broken, that you would think it impossible to alter it but to the worse.  To pass without any notice the agreeable and the elegant pieces of architecture, which without crowding adorn those delightful gardens; perhaps there is not a physick garden in Europe where any botanist can be more agreeably entertained, as to the variety of curious plants.  But there is something new as far as I know, and particularly ingenious here in the disposition and management of them.  Those that naturally delight in the rocks, and the dry hungry soil, are here planted upon ridges of artificial rock-work; where they shew all the luxuriance of vegetation that they could amongst the Alps, the Pyrenees or the Andes.  While a very different tribe, the Aquatics, display themselves in a large cistern, where they are constantly supplied with their best and most natural nourishment the rain water, conveyed to them from the eves of the richest greenhouse I have ever seen.

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library:  University of California

THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY

General Editors

  H. RICHARD ARCHER
    William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

  R.C.  BOYS
    University of Michigan

  E.N.  HOOKER
    University of California, Los Angeles

  JOHN LOFTIS
    University of California, Los Angeles

The society exists to make available inexpensive reprints (usually facsimile reproductions) of rare seventeenth and eighteenth century works.

The editorial policy of the Society continues unchanged.  As in the past, the editors welcome suggestions concerning publications.

All correspondence concerning subscriptions in the United States and Canada should be addressed to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2205 West Adams Blvd., Los Angeles 18, California.  Correspondence concerning editorial matters may be addressed to any of the general editors.  Membership fee continues $2.50 per year.  British and European subscribers should address B.H.  Blackwell, Broad Street, Oxford, England.

Publications for the fifth year [1950-1951]

(At least six items, most of them from the following list, will be reprinted.)

FRANCES REYNOLDS (?):  An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty, &c. (1785).  Introduction by James L. Clifford.

THOMAS BAKER:  The Fine lady’s Airs (1709).  Introduction by John Harrington Smith.