taste is a motive to employment, and employment secures him from the temptations to extravagance and the natural consequences of dissipated habits."[1] Further, we learn, one great object of the society is to educate a certain number of young men as gardeners. As "an inviting scene of public recreation," it is observed, "those who are little interested in the cultivation of Botany, and who may regard the employments of Horticulture with disdain, may still be induced to frequent the Botanical garden, for the beauty of the objects, the pleasures of the society, and the animating gaiety of the scene." [1] How pleasingly is the substance of these observations embodied in one of our "Snatches from _Eugene Aram_:"--"It has been observed, and there is a world of homely, ay, of legislative wisdom in the observation, that wherever you see a flower in a cottage garden, or a bird at the window, you may feel sure that the cottagers are better and wiser than their neighbours." Vol. i. p. 4. Yet with what wretched taste is this morality sought to be perverted in an abusive notice of Mr. Bulwer's _Eugene Aram_, in a Magazine of the past month, by a reference to Clark and Aram's stealing flower-roots from gentlemen's gardens to add to the ornaments of their own. The writer might as well have said that Clark and Aram were fair specimens of the whole human race, or that every gay flower in a cottage garden has been so stolen.