on which Wordsworth (in whose mystic strains he would have delighted) dwells. Thus he inferred that the soul of Xerxes must once have animated a plane tree, and retained a vivid feeling connected with his arboreal existence, when he read in Evelyn how that great king “stopped his prodigious army of seventeen hundred thousand soldiers to admire the pulchritude and procerity of one of those goodly trees; and became so fond of it, that spoiling both himself, his concubines, and great persons of all their jewels, he covered it with gold, gems, necklaces, scarfs and bracelets, and infinite riches; in sum, was so enamoured of it, that for some days, neither the concernment of his grand expedition, nor interest of honour, nor the necessary motion of his portentous army, could persuade him from it. He stiled it his mistress, his minion, his goddess; and when he was forced to part from it, he caused the figure of it to be stamped on a medal of gold, which he continually wore about him.” “That prudent Consul Passianus Crispus” must have been influenced by a like feeling, when he “fell in love with a prodigious beech of a wonderful age and stature, used to sleep under it, and would sometimes refresh it with pouring wine at the root.” Certainly as Evelyn has observed, “a goodly tree was a powerful attractive” to this person. The practice of regaling trees with such libations was not uncommon among the wealthy Romans; they seem to have supposed that because wine gladdened their own hearts, it must in like manner comfort the root of a tree: and Pliny assures us that it did so, _compertum id maximè prodesse radicibus_, he says, _docuimusque etiam arbores vina potare._ If this were so, the Doctor reasoned that there would be a peculiar fitness in fertilizing the vine with its own generous juice, which it might be expected to return with increase in richer and more abundant clusters: forgetting, ignoring, or disregarding this opinion which John Lily has recorded that the vine watered (as he calls it) with wine is soon withered. He was not wealthy enough to afford such an experiment upon that which clothed the garden-front of his house, for this is not a land flowing with wine and oil; but he indulged a favourite apple-tree (it was a Ribstone pippin) with cider; and when no sensible improvement in the produce could be perceived, he imputed the disappointment rather to the parsimonious allowance of that congenial liquor, than to any error in the theory.