THE FLOWER GARDEN. WITH AN ESSAY ON THE POETRY OF GARDENING. REPRINTED FROM THE QUARTERLY REVIEW.' LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1852. 141.0.47. THE following Essay on Flowers appeared originally in the Quarterly Review in the year 1842. Though many additions and corrections might now be made, it has been thought better on the whole to print it almost word for word as it was first published. A Chapter on the Poetry of Gardening, by the same writer, which first appeared in another Miscellany, has been added, as embodying, though under a somewhat conceited form, the same views of Gardening at greater length. March, 1852. THE FLOWER GARDEN. IF Dr. Johnson would not stop to inquire "whether landscape-gardening demands any great powers of the mind," we may surely be excused from the like investigation on the humbler subject of gardeningproper. But whether or not these pursuits demand, certain it is that they have exercised, the talents of as numerous and brilliant an assemblage of great names as any one subject can boast of. Without travelling into distant times or countries, we find among our own philosophers, poets, and men of taste, who have deemed gardening worthy their regard, the names of Bacon, Evelyn, Temple, Pope, Addison, Sir William Chambers, Lord Kames, Shenstone, Horace Walpole, Alison, Hope, and Walter Scott. Under the first and last of these authorities, omitting all the rest, we would gladly take our stand in defence of any study to which they had given their sanction on paper and in practice. Even in its own exclusive domain, gardening has raised no mean school of literature in the works of Gilpin, Whateley, the Masons, Knight, Price, and Repton. Time would fail us to tell of all those royal and |