With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare, That Heaven's air in this huge rondure hems. _Ibid._ xxi. (19) The summer's flower is to the summer sweet, Though to itself it only live and die; But if that flower with base infection meet, The basest weed outbraves his dignity: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. _Ibid._ xciv. (20) Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue Could make me any summer's story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew. _Ibid._ xcviii. "Of all the vain assumptions of these coxcombical times, that which arrogates the pre-eminence in the true science of gardening is the vainest. True, our conservatories are full of the choicest plants from every clime: we ripen the Grape and the Pine-apple with an art unknown before, and even the Mango, the Mangosteen, and the Guava are made to yield their matured fruits; but the real beauty and poetry of a garden are lost in our efforts after rarity, and strangeness, and variety." So, nearly forty years ago, wrote the author of "The Poetry of Gardening," a pleasant, though somewhat fantastic essay, first published in the "Carthusian," and afterwards re-published in Murray's "Reading for the Rail," in company with an excellent article from the "Quarterly" by the same author under the title of "The Flower Garden;" and I quote it because this "vain assumption" is probably stronger and more widespread now than when that article was written. We often hear and read accounts of modern gardening in which it is coolly assumed, and almost taken for granted, that the science of horticulture, and almost the love of flowers, is a product of the nineteenth century. But the love of flowers is no new taste in Englishmen, and the science of horticulture is in no way a modern science. We have made large progress in botanical science during the present century, and our easy communications with the whole habitable globe have brought to us thousands of new and beautiful plants in endless varieties; and we have many helps in gardening that were quite unknown to our forefathers. Yet there were brave old gardeners in our forefathers' times, and a very little acquaintance with the literature of the sixteenth century will show that in Shakespeare's time there was a most healthy and manly love of flowers for their own sake, and great industry and much practical skill in gardening. We might, indeed, go much further back than the fifteenth century, and still find the same love and the same skill. We have long lists of plants grown in times before the Conquest, with treatises on gardening, in which there