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reserved but respectful attachment. How often have I seen Italians shrug up their shoulders, and utter exclamations of surprise, when an English barouche passed them, with its broad-shouldered owner lolling at his ease inside, while the lady's maid was tanning in the sun, or biding the pelting of the storm, in the dickey outside. Their respect for the sex knows not these paltry distinctions of rank: theirs is the genuine gallantry of feeling; ours is the spurious one of manners and externals. Proofs crowd upon me: but I feel that I have established my assertion. I have weighed thee, John Bull, in the scale of nations; I have tried thee by a foreign test, and of pride and unsociableness thou art finally convicted.

WALKS IN THE GARDEN.-No. IV.

My garden takes up half my daily care,
And my field asks the minutes I can spare.

HARTE.

IT was said of Burke, that no one could stand under the same gateway with him, during a shower of rain, without discovering that he was an extraordinary man,―a very consolatory assertion to the inhabitants of London, who were not, perhaps, previously aware that any discovery could be made or pleasant association awakened during that most irksome period, when they are huddled with strange companions under the shelter of a low arch, gazing listlessly at the

rushing and wrangling kennel, or walking to the back of the covered way to exchange weeping looks with the sky. In that ten minutes of London's suspended animation, all is desolation and gloom; the deserted street is a wide waste of bubbles and mud; from the unimbibing flag-stones the discoloured drops scramble into the gutter to disembogue themselves into a feculent and stercoraceous receptacle, whither the imagination refuses to follow them:-now and then the loud pattering on an umbrella announces the approach of some sturdy pedestrian who hurries by, and the cheerless prospect is again confined to mud and stones, until a hackney-coach rattles past with its lame and dripping cattle, while the flap-hatted driver holds his head on one side to avoid the pelting of the storm, utterly indifferent to the upheld fingers of the shopand-alley-imprisoned women, or the impatient calls of appointment-breaking men; signals to which, but half an hour before, he would have been all eye, all ear. No delectable associations, either natural or literary, spring up to alleviate the tedium of such a detention as we have been describing; for even the recollection of Swift's imitative description of a cityshower will but aggravate the annoyances of our situation, by the fidelity with which he has pourtrayed the scene. How different the effect of a shower in the country! We have already noticed the air of enjoyment with which the trees droop down their branches to be fed, and the silent satisfaction with which the thirsty earth drinks in the refreshing mois

ture; but there is scarcely a drop of rain which we may not moralize into as many conceits as Jaques summoned up from the tears of the poor wounded stag. Are we in a puerile mood, we may forthwith realise that most palatable conception of Mother Bunch, by which our youthful imaginations have been so often raised to ecstasy, (is it not the tale of Prince Florizel ?) wherein the discriminating fairy rewards her obedient children, by summoning from the air a shower of tarts and cheesecakes-a prodigy which we can thus easily accomplish with the wand of fancy. The limpid drops destined to feed the corn whence the flour is obtained, and expand the pulp of the currant, raspberry, or gooseberry, which is to be enshrined in its paste, are clearly the primal though unconcocted elements of the feast which Mrs. Bunch, (away with the disrespectful term Mother!) perfected amid the magical ovens of the sky, and showered down into the upturned mouths of her infantine worshippers. Every fall of rain is, in fact, a new supply from the great ante-natal infinite of pastry.

Are we poetically inclined in our combinations, there is not a drop from which imagination may not extract beauty and melody, by pursuing it into the labyrinth of some "bosky dell" or dark umbrageous nook, only lighted up by the yellow eyes of the primrose; or we may convert it into a little crystal bark, suffering our fancies to float upon it adown some guggling rivulet, under a canopy of boughs, and between banks of flowers, nodding, like Narcissus, at their

own image in the water, and so sailing along in the moonlight to the accompaniment of its own music, we may realize Coleridge's

"Hidden brook

In the leafy month of June,

That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune."

By patience and perseverance the leaf of the mulberry-tree becomes satin; the rain which we shake from our feet may be metamorphosed into that leaf, and ultimately revisit them in the form of silk stockings. By anticipating the silent elaborations of Nature, and following up her processes, we may substantiate the dreams of those poets and Oriental writers who tell of roses, jonquils, and violets, falling from the sky, for almost every one of the globules of rain may be a future flower. Absorbed by the thirsty roots, it may be converted into sap, and, working its way into the flower-stalk, may, in process of time, assume the form of petals, turning their fragrant lips upwards to bless the sky, whence they originally descended. Or, are we disposed to contemplate the shower with a more exalted anticipation, we have but to recollect that all flesh is grass, and the inevitable converse of the proposition, that all grass is destined to become flesh, either animal or human, and straitway the rain becomes instinct with vitality, and we may follow each drop through its vegetable existence as pasture into the ribs of some future prize-ox; or into the sparkling eye of its proprietor, some unborn Mr. Coke or Lord Somerville, standing proudly by its

side; or into the heart of a Milton, the blood of a Hampden, or the brain of a Bacon. Thus in a passing shower may we unconsciously be pelted with the component parts of bulls and sheep, poets, patriots, and philosophers—a fantastical speculation perhaps, but it is better than shivering at the end of an alley in Holborn without thinking of any thing, or flattening one's nose against the pane of a coffee-house window in splenetic vacancy.

Having mentioned the name of Bacon, let us not omit to record his assertion, that "when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately, sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection :" a remark no less honourable to the noble science of horticulture, than historically accordant with fact. Our own pre-eminence at the present moment may be adduced in confirmation; and it is no slight evidence of advancing civilization in China, that they have become not less enthusiastic than expert in the cultivation of flowers. Scarce European plants command higher prices at Pekin than could be obtained for any Chinese production in London. But we have rambled and preluded till the shower is over, and we may now again venture out into the garden. This Fig-tree suggests the passing remark, that although the sexual system of plants owes its establishment chiefly to Linnæus, the fact was well known to the ancients. The Date-palm, in all ages a primary object of cultivation, bears barren and fertile flowers upon separate trees; and the Greeks soon discovered, that to have abundant and well-fla

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