The Quarterly Review, in reviewing Light's Travels, observes, that "Cheops employed three hundred and sixty thousand of his subjects for twenty years in raising this pyramid, or pile of stones, equal in weight to six millions of tons; and to render his precious dust more secure, the narrow chamber was made accessible only by small intricate passages, obstructed by stones of an enormous weight, and so carefully closed, externally, as not to be perceptible. Yet how vain are all the precautions of man! Not a bone was left of Cheops, either in the stone coffin, or in the vault, when Shaw entered the gloomy chamber." Sir Walter Scott himself, has justly received many eulogies. Perhaps none more heart-felt, than the effusion delivered at a late Celtic meeting, by that eloquent and honest lawyer, the present Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Exchequer, in Scotland, which was received by long, loud, and continued applause.
[38] John Bauhine wrote a Treatise in 1591, De Plantis à Divis sanctisve nomen habentibus.
Their Preface to the above Vol. ii. has this observation: "Plants, when taken from the places whence they derive their extraction, and planted in others of different qualities, betray such fondness for their native earth, that with great difficulty they are brought to thrive in another; and in this it is that the florist's art consists; for to humour each plant with the soil, the sun, the shade, the degrees of dryness or moisture, and the neighbourhood it delights in, (for there is a natural antipathy between some plants, insomuch that they will not thrive near one another) are things not easily attainable, but by a length of study and application."
[39] What these ruffles and lashes were, I know not. Perhaps the words of Johnson may apply to them:—
Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart,
Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart.
This mournful truth is every where confess'd,
Slow rises worth, by poverty oppress'd.
[40] Barnaby Gooche, in his Chapter on Gardens, calls the sun "the captaine and authour of the other lights, the very soule of the world."
[41] A translation of De Lille's garden thus pleads:—
Oh! by those shades, beneath whose evening bowers
The village dancers tripp'd the frolic hours;
By those deep tufts that show'd your fathers' tombs,
Spare, ye profane, their venerable glooms!
To violate their sacred age, beware,
Which e'en the awe-struck hand of time doth spare.
[42] Mr. Whateley observes, that "The whole range of nature is open to him, (the landscape gardener) from the parterre to the forest; and whatever is agreeable to the senses, or the imagination, he may appropriate to the spot he is to improve; it is a part of his business to collect into one place, the delights which are generally dispersed through different species of country."
[43] At page 24 he says, "Cato, one of the most celebrated writers on Husbandry and Gardening among the Romans, (who, as appears by his Introduction, took the model of his precepts from the Greeks) in his excellent Treatise De Re Rustica, has given so great an encomium on the excellence and uses of this good plant, (the Brocoli) not only as to its goodness in eating, but also in physick and pharmacy, that makes it esteemed one of the best plants either the field or garden produces."