most of his time with his mother and wife in gardens and temples; in riding by moonlight on a lory, decorated with a bow formed either of flowers or of a sugar cane, its string composed of bees, and his arrows pointed with the blossom of a spice tree." Cama is the Indian Cupid. Juvenal represents Lucan reposing in a garden; Tasso pictures Rinaldo sitting beneath the shade in a fragrant meadow; Virgil describes Anchises seated beneath sweetsmelling bay-trees, and Eneas as reclining, remote from all society, in a deep and winding valley. Pliny and Nazienzen delighted in gardens and orchards. Sallust formed them on so extensive a scale that they retained his name for several ages after his death. The conqueror of Mithridates enjoyed the society of his friends, and the wine of Falernium, in the splendid gardens which were an honour to his name. Semiramis was passionately attached to the forming of gardens. The disciples of Epicurus were styled "Philosophers of the garden," from that which Epicurus had planted at Athens. Seneca is said to have incurred the hatred of Nero more from having magnificent gardens than from any other cause. Cimon embellished the groves of Academus with trees, walks, and fountains; and Cicero enumerates gardening as one of the more suitable employments of old age. The great Prince de Conde, after devoting much of his life to military operations, being confined in the Tower of Vincennes, with the Prince of Conti and the Duke de Longueville, by the intrigues of Cardinal Mazarin, amused many of his hours of imprisonment by cultivating flowers in pots. Linnæus, who caught the first impressions of love for natural science in his father's garden,

studied in his bower; and Buffon in his summer-house, which Prince Henry of Prussia called the "cradle of natural history." This naturalist, who embellished Nature with a glowing style, seldom went out of his domain, and for years his longest tours were from his house to his bower, and from his bower to his summerhouse. Cyprian lived in a small garden in a village near to Carthage. There he was, as it were, lost in contemplation, when the Valerian persecution began. St. Augustine was equally attached to the beauties of Nature. "One day," he says in his Confessions, "as I was looking out of my window, I fell into a discourse with my mother respecting the nature of eternal felicity, and drawing inferences from the flowers and shrubs before us, I proceeded to a consideration of the sun and stars, and thence, meditating on the glory of the celestial regions, we became so ravished with our contemplations that for some time we forgot that we were the inhabitants of earth."

From what remote and different regions of our earth have the flowers and shrubs which beautify our gardens been gathered and brought; Simon de Tour introduced the tuberose from Ceylon. The chequered lily was brought from Hungary in the sixteenth century; the belladonna lily was first introduced to Spain from South America; the auricula was brought from the mountains of Switzerland; the crown imperial from Persia; the Guernsey lily was brought from Japan in the beginning of the seventeenth century. It derived its name from the circumstance of a ship which contained several roots, in its voyage from Japan, being wrecked on the Guernsey coast. Float

C

ing to the shore they took root, and being observed to produce very beautiful flowers, they attracted the attention of the governor's son, by whose care they were preserved, propagated, and distributed. Currants, as their name implies, were first brought from Corinth; the cypress from Cyprus ; the damson and the damask rose from Damascus.

In the Malay language the same word signifies a woman and a flower. The naturalist seldom sees a common thistle without associating it with the goldfinch which sits upon it, extracts the down with its bill, and feeds upon its seeds. Examine in the expanding flower the opening bud, and say if anything can be more exquisitely folded than its petals, formed in the calyx before that calyx expands. The season of a flower's conception is that of her beauty; her family she cherishes in the germen; and when she has completed the maturity of her seeds she finds her consolation in parting with her offspring in autumn; in the pleasure of seeing them start up by her side in the season of spring, images of her own person, expanding their petals and receiving the pollen, and becoming mothers in the same season as herself.

Millions too grow at the bottom of the sea, forming shades to innumerable fishes which never quit their beds. They have their mountains and their valleys, their plains, recesses, and caves in which to strike root. When we see a violet hiding itself under a bramble, a heliotrope courting the rays of the sun, or a fuchsia hanging its vermilion petals with its veil of purple; when we behold the bee, so tenacious of her mysteries that from the first morning of

the animal creation she still preserves her secrets; when we listen to the jug, the pause, the warble of the nightingale; when we behold the unexampled splendour of the diamond beetle, the majestic coquetry of the swan, or the graceful pride and modesty of the stag-we involuntarily think of the language of the Psalmist, who in the contemplation of the varied works of the Creator exclaims, "O Lord, how manifold are thy works: in wisdom hast thou made them all!"

How numerous and beautiful are the designs which flowers have suggested for painting, sculpture, and architecture. In the manufacture of silks, cottons, and other fabrics flowers are used and adopted as giving the greatest variety. The passage in the Enead, where Andromache presents to Ascanius a robe wrought with flowers of golden tissue, and requests him to accept it as a friendly gift from the wife of Hector to a youth in whom appeared all the charms and graces of her lost Astyanax, is exceedingly beautiful. Poets were crowned with bays, conquerors with laurel. "Nature," says Pliny, "has some flowers for pleasure; these last but a day. She has trees for use which last for years, as if she intended to intimate that whatever is splendid passes Badges of nations are That of England is a

away and soon loses its lustre. frequently derived from flowers.

rose; France has adopted the lily; Ireland, the shamrock; and Scotland, the thistle. Poets have in all ages delighted in gardens and flowers; hence they abound in allusions to the fading of the flowers as emblematic of the shortness of human life. Horace has many such allusions. Tasso employs it :

"Thus in a day withers the flower of life!
Vain is the hope life's verdure will return;
Life will its spring, its verdure, and its flowers
Never resume."

So Gisborne :

"The meanest herb we trample in the field,
Or in the garden nurture, when its leaf
In autumn dies forebodes another spring,
And from that slumber wakes to life again.

Man wakes no more! Man, peerless, valiant, wise,
Once chilled by death, sleeps hopeless in the dust,

A long, unbroken, never-ending sleep."

In the Winter's Tale Perdita suits the flowers she distributes to the season of life of those to whom she presents them. To old men she gives rue and rosemary, which keep all winter; to those of middle age she presents flowers of summer, such as lavender, mint, marjoram, and marigold; to the young, oxlips, crown imperials, primroses, lilies, flowers-de-luce, daffodils, and violets. Horace compares youth to ivy and myrtle, old age to dried leaves.

Marmontel speaks very tenderly of the bee-garden of St. Thomas, which was kept and tended by his aunt. He says: "I was never happier than when in the bee-garden of St. Thomas. I passed a fine day in reading the verses of Virgil on the industry and policy of those laborious republics that prospered so happily under the care of my aunt. She had surrounded their little domain with fruit trees, and with those that flowered in early spring. She there had introduced a little stream of limpid water, that flowed on a bed of pebbles, and on its borders, thyme, lavender, and marjoram, and, in short, the plants which