My nephew seems here to have intended to institute a comparison between the conditions of the factory-child and the school-boy, and to draw a parallel between the birch-rod and the billy-roller: and there is also evidence of an intention to ask old Dame Nature some very unceremonious questions as to her reasons for the creation of the tree of which the former instrument is composed.

He now seems about to draw towards a conclusion. He meditates a touching appeal to the mercy of all those who "teach the young idea how to shoot," and then, (after the most approved poetical fashion) a passionate Jeremiad on the utter inutility of such a proceeding. Towards the close he becomes prophetic, and indulges in visions of a bright and happy future,-winding up with the following burst of genuine feeling and philanthropy:

"Oh! for the day,—and soon that day shall come !—
When mangled schoolboys shall assert their rights!
All sweeping intellect is on its march!

Long-exiled mercy mounts her throne once more!
And soon shall Flogging seek oblivion's gloom,
And blocks and birches be a sound unknown!”

Such, Messieurs Editors, was the design, and such is the partial accomplishment. Whether the public has gained or lost by the non-completion of my nephew's Epic, belongs to its readers to decide.

THE POETRY OF GARDENING.

"Lilia mista rosis."-School Exercise.

"GOD ALMIGHTY first planted a garden, and indeed it is the purest of all human pleasures." I love Lord Bacon for that saying more than for his being the author of the "Novum Organon." Willingly I would give up his four folio volumes of philosophy for his one little book of Essays, and all these for his one little Essay on Gardening. It is indeed only by the study of "those fragments of his conceits," as he calls them, that the full compass of that great man's mind can be understood. He did not think it beneath his philosophy to descant on such toys as the ordering of a Masque and the dressing of a Garden. He discusses, with perfect love of the subject, how "the colours that show best by candlelight are white, carnation, and a kind of sea-water green"; and how that "onches or spangs, as they are of no great cost, so are they of most glory," and recommends, with the very refinement of luxury, as "things of great pleasure and refreshment, some sweet odours suddenly coming forth" on the company, in the midst of the entertainment.

With a still greater love and adoption of his subject, he enters into the description of how royally he would order his garden. Dear old Evelyn himself never eyed with more complacency his four hundred feet of holly "blushing with its natural coral", than Bacon does his phantastic vision of a "stately arched hedge," and "over every arch a little turret, with belly enough to receive a cage of birds, and over every space between the arches some other little figure, with broad plates of round coloured glass for

the sun to play upon." I envy not that man's heart who can view with indifference the great philosopher indulging in his day-dreams of a spacious pleasaunce, where fruits, from the orange to the service tree, and flowers, from the stately hollyhock to the tuft of wild thyme, are to flourish, each in its proper place; "there should be the pale daffodil and the clove-gilliflower, and the almond and apple-tree in blossom, and roses of all kinds, some removed to come in late,' so that you may have ver perpetuum' all the year through."

Lord Bacon has indeed left us little to wish in the Poetry of Gardening. His prince-like design of a demesne of thirty acres, containing "a green at the entrance, a heath or desert in the going forth, the main garden in the midst, besides alleys on both sides," combines the natural and artificial styles in their most perfect features; and if he realized in his retreat at Gorhambury but the outline of his splendid vision, the gardens of the Hesperides, or of Hafiz, could have no greater charm.

Of all the vain assumptions of these coxcomical 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. To be the possessor of a unique pansy, the introducer of a new specimen of the Orchidaceæ, or the cultivator of 500 choice varieties of the dahlia, is now the only claim to gardening celebrity and Horticultural medals.

And then our lot has fallen in the evil days of System.

We are proud of our natural or English style; and scores of unmeaning flower-beds, disfiguring the lawn in the shapes of kidneys, and tadpoles, and sausages, and leeches, and commas, are the result. Landscape-gardening has encroached too much upon gardening-proper; and this has had the same effect upon our gardens that horticultural societies have had on our fruits,-to make us entertain the vulgar notion, that size is virtue.

The picturesquians have fortunately had their day, and wholesale manufacturers of by-lanes and dilapidated cottages are no longer in vogue in our parks; but they seem yet to linger about our parterres, though they have far less business here, and indeed should never for a moment have been allowed a footing,-for there are no greater extremes in art than a garden and a picture.

If we review the various styles that have prevailed in England, from the knotted gardens of Elizabeth, the pleach-work and intricate flower-borders of James I., the painted Dutch statues and canals of William and Mary, the winding gravel walks and lake-making of Brown, to poor Shenstone's sentimental farm and the landscape-fashion of the present day,-we shall have little reason to pride ourselves on the advance which national taste has made upon the earliest efforts in this department.

If I am to have a system at all, give me the good old system of terraces and angled walks, and clipt yew-hedges, against whose dark and rich verdure the bright oldfashioned flowers glittered in the sun. I love the topiary art, with its trimness and primness, and its open avowal of its artificial character. It repudiates at the first glance the sculking and cowardly "celare artem" principle, and, in its vegetable sculpture, is the properest transition from the architecture of the house to the natural beauties of the grove and paddock.

Who, to whom the elegance, and gentlemanliness, and poetry, the Boccaccio-spirit-of a scene of Watteau is familiar, does not regret the devastation made by tasty innovators upon the grounds laid out in the times of the Jameses and Charleses? As for old Noll, I am certain, though I have not a jot of evidence, that he cared no more for a garden than for an anthem; he would as lief have sacrificed the verdant sculpture of a yew-peacock as the time-honoured tracery of a cathedral shrine; and his crop-eared soldiery would have had as great satisfaction in bivouacking in the parterres of a "royal pleasaunce" as in the presence-chamber of a royal palace. It were a sorrow beyond tears to dwell on the destruction of garden-stuff in those king-killing times. Thousands, doubtless, of broad-paced terraces and trim vegetable conceits sunk in the same ruin with their mansions and their masters: and alas! modern taste has followed in the footsteps of ancient fanaticism. How many old associations have been rooted up with the knotted stumps of yew and hornbeam! And Oxford too in the van of reform! Beautiful as are St. John's gardens, who would not exchange them for the very walks and alleys along which Laud, in all the pardonable pride of collegiate lionizing, conducted his illustrious guests Charles and Henrietta? who does not grieve that we must now inquire in vain for the bowling-green in Christ Church, where Cranmer solaced the weariness of his last confinement? And who lately, in reading Scott's life, but must have mourned in sympathy with the poet over the destruction of "the huge hill of leaves" and the yew and hornbeam hedges of the "Garden" at Kelso.

In those days of arbours and bowers, Gardening was an art, not a mystery; and such an art that the simplest maid could comprehend it. They who loved could