As to the best time for a visit, that depends partly on which aspect of the Island is to be sought, not to say on circumstances and opportunity; but to my mind it wears its fairest face in its dullest season, when its hotel-keepers see cause to take their own holiday. Then, in early summer, flocks of sheep-like tourists miss seeing at their freshest and richest the clumps of umbrageous foliage, the hedgerows and copses sweet with gay blossoms, the turfy slopes spangled with wild flowers, the glowing meadows, the blooming cottage plots, the “weeds of glorious feature,” and in short, all the charms that make this one of “the gardens of England,” in which, exclaims Oliver Wendell Holmes, “everything grows with such a lavish extravagance of greenery that it seems as if it must bankrupt the soil before autumn.” It is better visited in spring, which comes so early up this way, that Easter as well as Whitsuntide holiday-makers may catch the first flush of one of those nooks described by Dr Bromfield in his _Flora Vectensis_--“a blooming wilderness of primroses, wood-anemones, violets, and a hundred other lovely and fragrant things, overtopped by the taller and purple-stained wood-spurge, early purple orchis, and the pointed hoods of the spotted-leaved wake-robin; the daisy-besprinkled track leading us upward, skirted by mossy fern-clad banks on one hand, and by shelving thickets on the other, profusely overshadowed by ivy-arched oak and ash, the graceful birch, and varnished holly.” Then still sooner may be looked for the spangling of the sheltered Undercliff, where, as Miss Sewell describes: “The ground is tossed about in every direction, and huge rocks lie scattered upon it. But thorns and chestnuts and ash-trees have sprung up amongst them upon the greensward; ivy has climbed up the ledges of the jagged cliffs; primroses cluster upon the banks; cowslips glitter on the turf; and masses of hyacinths may be seen in glades, half hidden by the foliage of the thick trees, through which the jutting masses of grey rock peep out upon the open sea, sparkling with silver and blue some hundreds of feet beneath them.”