The famous Plane of Buyukdéré on the Bosphorus is popularly said to serve even now as a tent for the Seraskier when he encamps there. The Romans took to it, as we have said, with that extravagant enthusiasm which characterised their follies; “the only tree,” says Pliny, in his sententious stoical way, “which ever was transplanted for the sake of its shade alone.” Julius Cæsar himself planted the first specimen in Spain, at Corduba; it was a noble tree in Martial’s time, and flourished, as he says, by being irrigated with wine. “Crevit et affuso lætior umbra mero.” It became so common in the Roman pleasances, that groves of planes, as well as laurels, are spoken of by the same poet as the ornaments of every citizen’s place of ordinary pretensions. “Daphnones, platanones, et aëriæ cyparissi.” Undoubtedly, in fashionable Campania, it must have been so common as to form a familiar feature in the landscape. But it perished with the remainder of that luxurious civilisation. In a convent garden at Naples—so a traveller tells us—there remains one enormous specimen, of an antiquity which can only be conjectured: the grandchild, it may be, of some forlorn ornament of a ruined villa, which had seen the Goths march into Italy. We have heard of no others of the genuine race. Of late years, indeed, the plane has begun to resume its popularity as an ornamental tree, and for the same reasons—its delightful shade, namely, and its adaptation to the atmosphere of great cities; being able to throw off the noxious residuum of coal smoke by the peeling of its bark. Planes are now the common trees of the market place in Southern Europe, as they are in our London squares. But, unhappily, the variety almost always seen is of new importation, not of the old stock; not the princely oriental, but its plebeian cousin the occidental, or button-wood of the United States; faster in growth, taller,—stronger perhaps—but incomparably uglier: a melancholy instance of the encroachments of modern democracy.