The Lathom pleasure-grounds and gardens are not less beautiful than the wood. In the former, among many other rare and admirable trees, there is a plane, in Lancashire quite a stranger; this one the very emblem of health and nobleness, a sight, as Dame Quickly says, "to thank God on:" the latter teem with interesting hardy herbaceous plants, quite refreshing to behold after the inlay of chromatic geometry which at the present day is so often substituted for a garden. The flowers, in great abundance and variety, are chiefly of the kinds that the poets and artists always loved, those that have been sung of in a thousand simple verses, which the poets still love best of all, and which, when neatly and nicely marshalled and tended, keep up an unrelaxing flow of tinted loveliness from the time of Christmas-roses and yellow aconites until that of the last lingering asters of November. Access to this charming place is for the favoured few not beyond the range of the possibilities. Never yet, when properly asked, has the Earl of Lathom refused to give proof of generous courtesy such as distinguishes the Lancashire gentleman and the English nobleman. Not far from Lathom Park there is another very interesting old family seat, Blythe Hall, the residence of the Hon. Mrs. Bootle-Wilbraham. This is approached most pleasantly from Burscough, through lanes, meadows, and corn-fields, and in its garden, like Lathom, and, we may add, like Cheshire Tatton, gives delightful guarantee that, despite the enmity of modern planters, genuine floriculture will, with the tasteful, outlive them all. There are fit and proper places, no doubt, for every style and system of flower-planting. Any mode that pleases a considerable number of rational people is proved, by the simple fact of its doing so, to be right under certain conditions, local ones, and limited. The misfortune is that "bedding-out" very generally implies, if it does not necessitate, the abolition of a thousand things that are individually and supremely meritorious, the piece of land which it embosses becoming only by a euphemism, "a garden," and this at infinitely greater pains than if cultivated.