Our Garden of Peace is a Garden of Freedom--freedom of thought, freedom of converse. In it one may cultivate all the flora of illiteracy without rebuke, as well as the more delicate, but possibly less fragrant growths of literature, including those hybrids which I suppose must give great satisfaction to the cultivators. We assert our claim to talk about whatever we please: we will not submit to be told that anything is out of our reach as a subject: if we cannot reach the things that are so defined we can at least make an attempt to knock them down with a bamboo. Eventually we may even discourse of flowers; but if we do we certainly will not adopt the horticultural standard of worth, which is “of no/some commercial value.” A good many things well worthy of a strict avoidance in conversation possess great commercial value, and others that we hold very close to our hearts are of no more intrinsic value than a Victoria Cross. We have done and shall do our best, however, not to make use of the word culture, unless it be in connection with a disease. The lecturers on tropical diseases talk of their “cholera cultures” and their “yellow fever cultures” and their “malaria cultures but we know that there is a more malignant growth than any of these: it is spelt by its cultivators with the phonetic “K” and it has banished the word that begins with a “c” from the English language, unless, as I say, in referring to the development of a malady. That is where victory may be claimed by the vanquished: the beautiful word is banished for ever from the English literature in which it once occupied an exalted place. It is because of the Freedom which we enjoy in this Garden of Peace of ours that I did not hesitate for a moment to quote Tennyson to Dorothy a few' days ago, when we were chatting about Poets' Gardens, from the “garden inclosed” of the Song of Solomon--the most beautiful ever depicted--to that of _Maud_. It requires some courage to quote Tennyson beyond the limits of our own fireside in these days. The days when he was constantly quoted now seem as the days of Noë, before the Flood--the flood of the formless which we are assured is poetry nowadays. It is called “The New School.” Some twenty-five or thirty years ago something straddled across our way through the world labelled “New Art.” Its lines were founded upon those of the crushed cockroach, and it may have contributed to the advance of the temperance movement; for its tendency was certainly to cause any inebriate who found a specimen watching him wickedly from the mouth of a vase of imitation pewter on the mantel-shelf in a drawingroom, or in the form of a pendant in sealing-wax enamel on the neck of a young woman, to pull himself together and sign anything in reason in the direction of abstaining.