This garden--which, during the winter months, is the lounge of the English idler at Naples, and then looks as flowerless and dingy as Kensington in an east wind--assumes a very different appearance in spring. On the 7th of May, we, who had passed the winter at Rome, were at once struck with the brilliancy of unusual blossoms, and the number of distinguished vegetable foreigners who lifted their heads out of parterres, of the very existence of which in winter one is scarcely conscious. The formal line of clipt _Ilex_ that looks towards the sea, had changed its dusky hue for a warmer tint; statues that had been doing sentinel all the winter without relief, now seem to bend delighted over fragrant flower-beds, and enjoy the spring. Two high shrubs in flower (_Metresiglias_) hoist from opposite beds, the one its _white_, the other its _red_ banner. Two of the _Muses_, the _Speciosa_ and _Paravisogna_, or bread-tree plant, were raising their light spiry trunks out of a _corbeille_ taller than a life-guardsman. They want no hothouse in Naples:--would you shade your face from the sun, an elsewhere exotic, the Brazilian _Camarotta_ at your feet, furnishes you with a _screen_. The _white flocks_ of the _Acacia verticillata_ are peeping out from the ranks of those small _triangular leaves_, which are so singularly attached, without stalks, by one of these angles to the stem. Amidst these pleasant perfumes camphor would be unwelcome, but there is the _laurel_ that yields it. _Fennel_ has here become a tree, in which, like the _mustard_ of the Gospels, the fowls of the air may lodge; we are dwarfs beside it! Three kinds of the soft, slimy Mallow of the Marsh are here so much WOODY and so tall, that we must pick their flowers on tiptoe. The _flattened disk_ of the sky-blue _Nana arborea_ contrasts with the _Betula sanguinea_, glowing deeply in the flower-bed of many lighter-coloured petals; the sweet-scented _African laurel_ grows against the long-leafed Babylonian willow, which _susurrates_ droopingly over your head, as if it were "by _the waters of Babylon_." The fountains, with their _hydrophilous_ tribes, add to the charm; and many a beautiful _Launaria aquatica_ had already buoyed himself up on his large _cordate leaves_ on the surface of the _tazza_, and was filling his vegetable skin with water. All these beauties and peculiarities, a mere scantling of the whole of the Villa Reale, escape the lounger, and the nurserymaids, and children, and those of either sex who have appointments to keep, or to look out for; and the soldiers, and the police, and the Neapolitan nobility and gentry, and the pickpockets, and others:--to the nurseryman and botanist, things not to be forgotten; and at present the weather is not too hot to interfere with their enjoyment. SERVI DI PENA.