The Ilex, interesting alike from its appearance and physiology, first engages our notice. Compact and solid while yet a shrub, (for hers is indeed an _old_ head upon _young_ shoulders,) she grows like a tree that is to count by centuries, and under no advantage of soil or situation does her sober aspect change; no premature overgrowth was ever known to weaken her fibres, those _tetes mortees_; the Lombardy poplars there, whose only merit is their height, may shoot up ever so tauntingly, for aught she cares, at her elbow; her ambition is not like that of the stately pines, to nurse a noisy aviary on high; nor does she seek to rival the fair sisterhood of the Acacias in the youthful vanity of overdecking her person; one dark-coloured investment lasts her, and remains unchanged the whole year through. But though she takes no improper "pride in dress," even the rigid Dr Watts would hardly be disposed to object to the exceedingly _charming_ trimming of semi-transparent green flouncing, and the rich festoons of straw-yellow tassels, with which--not to appear insensible to the festivities of spring--she has just now fringed her winter apparel. Making less demands upon the earth than many of her neighbours, she turns her supplies to better account; her acorns from early youth are firm and mature; excrescences, the common result of excess, mar not the rough symmetry of her hardy frame--few insects feed upon that uncompromising rind, which, opposing itself to most cryptogamic alliance, seldom suffers moss or lichen to spread over its incised and tesselated surface, "Save here and there in spots aye dank and dark, When the green meshes fill the fissured bark."