deserves a serious and unprejudiced consideration. Tarragon vinegar, or anything else which must predominate, we hold to be heretical. Salad is good society; whatever is obtrusive must be excluded. Therefore we think that the quality of the oil is not criticised with sufficient strictness: if it has the least twang, it predominates over everything, and you continue to taste it after it should have been long forgotten.

At this juncture our readers will thank us for producing (by permission courteously granted) a 'Receipt for a Winter Salad,' written many years ago at Castle Howard by the late Mr. Sydney Smith. He so rarely (after school-days) used his admirable talent for versification, that this specimen of it would be valued, even although the Prescription were not-what it certainly is-in itself an excellent one :

'Two large potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Unwonted softness to the salad give.

Of mordent mustard add a single spoon-
Distrust the condiment which bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault
To add a double quantity of salt.
Three times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And once with vinegar, procured from town.
True flavour needs it, and your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs.
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole;
And lastly, on the flavoured compound toss

A magic teaspoon of anchovy sauce.

Then, though green turtle fail, though venison 's tough,
And ham and turkey are not boiled enough,

Serenely full, the Epicure may say—

Fate cannot harm me-I have dined to-day!'

To return to Mr. Evelyn-while he gave a helping hand to rational improvement, the amiable senior cautiously avoided horticultural quackeries :

'March. Sow stock gillyflowers in the full of the moon, to produce double flowers. In the meantime, let gentlemen and ladies who are curious trust little by mangonisme,* insuccations, or medecine, to alter the species, or indeed the forms and shapes of flowers considerably, that is, to render that double which nature produces but single,' &c.-Kalendarium.

Evelyn moreover is valuable by helping us to mark the introduction of several of our cultivated vegetables. Of Artichaux,'

Mangonizo, to polish, paint, and trim up a thing to make it sell better.—

Ainsworth.

he

he tells us (Acetaria): "Tis not very long since this noble thistle came first into Italy, improv'd to this magnitude by culture, and so rare in England that they were commonly sold for crowns a piece; but what Carthage yearly spent in them-as Pliny computes the sum-amounted to sestertia sena millium—30,000l. sterling. Note that of the Spanish cardon-a wild and smaller artichoak, with sharp-pointed leaves and lesser head-the stalks, being blanched and tender, are serv'd up à la poiverade (that is, with oyl, pepper, &c.), as the French term is. Of Pompey's beloved dish, so highly celebrated by old Cato' he says: "Tis scarce an hundred years since we first had Cabbages out of Holland; Sir Anthony Ashley, of Wiburg St. Giles, in Dorsetshire (ancestor of the Earls of Shaftesbury), being-as I am told-the first who planted them in England.' Of the melon he bids us 'Note, that this fruit was very rarely cultivated in England, so as to bring it to maturity, till Sir George Gardner came out of Spain; I myself remembering when an ordinary melon would have been sold for five or six shillings.' Spinach was by original a Spaniard.' Tarragon also of Spanish extraction;' and 'the caulyflower (anciently unknown) from Aleppo.'

Some of our garden esculents are of high antiquity; asparagus was a favourite vegetable with Cato, and onions are inscrutable. Others are quite modern upstarts. Sea-kale is one of these-by the present mode of producing it. And a truly British dish it is. On many parts of the south coast the inhabitants, from time immemorial, have been in the habit of searching for it in the spring where it grows spontaneously, and cutting off the young and tender leaves and stalks, as yet unexpanded and in a blanched state, close to the crown of the root. Evelyn, confounding it with the broccoli from Naples, perhaps the halmerida of Pliny' -For Athenæus rather]-capitata marina et florida,' mentions that our sea-keele, the ancient crambe, and growing on our coast, are very delicate.' But its cultivation is a recent practice. Mr. Curtis, in his Directions for Cultivating the Crambe maritima or Sea-kale (1799), tells us,

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Mr. William Jones, of Chelsea, saw bundles of it, in a cultivated state, exposed for sale in Chichester market, in the year 1753. I learn from different persons that attempts have been made at various times to introduce it to the London markets, but ineffectually. A few years since I renewed the attempt myself, and though it was not attended with all the success I could have wished, I flatter myself it has been the means of making the plant so generally known that in future the markets of the first city in the world will be duly supplied with this most desirable article.'

Rhubarb affords the latest instance of the intrusion and estab

VOL. LXXXIX. NO. CLXXVII.

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lishment

lishment of strange herbage in our kitchen-gardens. Mr. Cuthill, the well-known horticulturist of Camberwell, with a praiseworthy feeling of respect for a senior brother of the craft, records in his Practical Instructions for the Cultivation of the Potato, &c. &c. (1850), that

Mr. Joseph Myatt of Deptford, a most benevolent man now upwards of seventy years of age, was the first to cultivate rhubarb on a large scale. It is now nearly forty years since he sent his two sons to the Borough market with five bunches of which they could only sell three. The next time they took ten bunches, all of which were sold. Coming events cast their shadow before, and from the small but increased sale Mr. Myatt judged that rhubarb would become a favourite. He therefore determined to increase its cultivation, and year after year added to his stock. For his first dozen roots he was indebted to his friend Mr. Oldacre, gardener to Sir Joseph Banks. They consisted of a kind imported from Russia, finer and much earlier than the puny variety cultivated by the Brentwood growers for Covent Garden. Mr. Myatt had to contend against many prejudices; but time, that universal leveller, overcame and broke down every barrier, and rhubarb is now no longer called physic.'

The foot-stalks of the physic-plant are now regarded as a necessary rather than a luxury in culinary management. The most frugal table can display its rhubarb pudding or tart, in season. The dainty has been published at a different rate from the pineapple-another bit of a parvenu amongst the respectable fruit families. In a copy of the Hortus Medicus Amstelodamus, now by favour at hand, on the plate Ananas is entered the following MS. note by P. Collinson-the eminent F.R.S.:-'S Matthew Decker first brought the Ananas or Pine Apple into England to his Garden at Richmond, where I saw them about the year 1712.' In the Horticultural Transactions, vol. i. (p. 150), we read :—

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, on her journey to Constantinople, in the year 1716, remarks the circumstance of pine-apples being served up in the dessert at the Electoral table at Hanover as a thing she had never before seen or heard of. Had pines been then grown in England, her ladyship could not have been ignorant of the fact.'

It would be almost presumptuous in us to offer any attestation of the great value of these Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London. To mention merely a few of many remarkable elderly papers-the Account of a new Strawberry, with a coloured Figure, by Michael Keens [N.B. not Keen], Gardener of Isleworth;' An Account of Two Varieties of Cherry, raised at Downton Castle; Notes relative to the first Appearance of the Aphis Lanigera or Apple-Tree Insect in this Country,' &c., &c., are now important portions of horticultural history.

Of the multitudes who pass through Covent-garden Market

six days out of seven, the great majority certainly are unaware of the time and trouble that many common esculents have cost the gardener. Perpend, for example, the almost twelvemonths' occupance of his soil by the best varieties of broccoli-which the vulgar are constantly confounding with cauliflowers.

When the bright Bull ascending first adorns
The Spring's fair forehead with his golden horns,
Italian seeds with parsimonious hand

The watchful gardener scatters o'er his land;
Quick moves the rake, with iron teeth divides
The yielding glebe, the living treasure hides;
O'er the smooth soil, with horrent thorns beset,
Swells in the breeze the undulating net;
Bright shells and feathers dance on twisting strings,
And the scared finch retreats on rapid wings.

But when three leaves the young aspirer shoots,
To other soils transplant the shortened roots;
There in wide ranks thy verdant realms divide,
Parting each opening file a martial stride.

When leads the Spring amid her budding groves
The laughing Graces and the quivered Loves,
Again the Bull shall shake his radiant hair
O'er the rich product of his early care;
With hanging lip and longing eye shall move,
And Envy dwell in yon blue fields above.

Oft in each month, poetic Tighe! be thine
To dish green broccoli with savoury chine;
Oft down thy tuneful throat be thine to cram
The snow-white cauliflower with fowl and ham!
Nor envy thou, with such rich viands blest,

The pye of Perigord, or swallow's nest.'-Phytologia, p. 560. The knowing Doctor shows his taste in lauding the green broccoli, despised as they are by cooks because they do not dish so prettily as the white. We wish we had space either for verse or prose that might let the reader into the secret of growing sea-kale without the expense of pots and forcing, and of better flavour than with those aids; but the carte of our course of vegetables must be limited. Otherwise there were no less temptation to enlarge on leeks and cibbols; hot,' says Evelyn, and of vertue prolifick; since Latona, the mother of Apollo, long'd after them.' He adds 'the Welch, who eat them much, are observ'd to be very fruitful.' It is not, however, recorded that Ancient Pistol became the parent of a family of Revolvers in consequence of his compulsory feast during the Gallia wars.'

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For

For these, and a host of other things, we must refer to Loudon's Encyclopædia of Gardening- a most useful compendium-if we may call so bulky a book a compendium, which, however, it truly is. But for a weekly supply of varied information the Gardener's Chronicle takes the lead. Dr. Lindley's name is a sufficient guarantee for its merits-but, if more be asked for, observe the free use made of it by second-chop publications. An amusing and sometimes a valuable portion of the paper is the Home Correspondence'-a sort of committee of the whole house of readers, with the editor in the chair. Experiences, hopes, discoveries, crotchets, are herein detailed and discussed the more modest virtuosi adopting such veils as X. Y. Z. or P. Q. R. (They are all above L.S. D.) Curious pseudonyms are sometimes concocted;-one lynx-eyed fellow calls himself Argo, disturbing the memory of the lady who signed Ignorama, and the Bill of a certain veteran patriot for the better regulation of Omnibi ;*. but these are welcome plums, to save us from eating too much plain pudding. There is always enough of solid matter, a sufficiency of pièces de résistance, to ballast the trifle and the bonbon crackers.

--

As to the Cottage Gardener, its contents are more suitable for a double-coach-housed cottage of gentility '-than for that usually tenanted by the labourer. But the only fault in this is, that an unnecessarily humble title has been assumed. The genuine cottager would hardly spend 3d. per week upon garden literature, whatever he might on seeds and plants; and his landlord or his rector will probably have given or lent him Paxton's Calendar, or some other of the many useful elementary books that are to be had. It is desirable that the labourer should take an interest in, and see, the higher operations of the art; he will perform the lower ones all the better for the apprenticeship. Though he be likely never to have a vinery and a pinery of his own to attend to, an initiation into their mysteries will help him to treat his children with a plateful of early radishes, and his wife with a dish of out-door grapes; and if she has the self-denial to turn them into money, instead of eating them, she will esteem him and them none the less for that. We have observed in the gardens of those labourers whose opportunities are above the average of their class, most pleasing evidence of the knowledge they have thus acquired. Just as a course of mathematics at Cambridge would make a man all the more valuable as an accountant or a clerk, so, to the horticultural graduate,

*The same patriarch who, when some graceless Tories laughed at a statement of his, said, honourable members in white waistcoats might be as merry as they chose, but he was speaking seriatim.'

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