Mr. Chamberlain made an interesting little speech on horticulture on
Wednesday, at the fifty-second anniversary festival of the Gardeners' Royal Benevolent Institution, at the Whitehall Rooms of the Hotel Metropole. He quoted Bacon's essay in praise of gardening, and added to it that gardening gives pleasure to the poor and the rich alike, and may be .easily adapted, being so elastic as it is, either to the frugal means of the very poor, or to the ample resources of the millionaire. Cottage gardens yielded no less delight,—might he not have said, a good deal more P—than the most splendid .conservatories of lordly mansions. A new variety of the pansy or auricula raised in the cottage, reared by the tender -care of a village amateur, was "a source of as much self- glorification" as the costliest orchid imported from the tropics ever was to the richest horticulturist. We should have supposed that it was the source of a good deal more tender pride, though perhaps of a good deal less "self- glorification." The pride in a successful expenditure of pains . and skill on a rare natural beauty, is more of the nature of a • shy disinterested affection than of mere ostentatious self- -exaltation. The personal devotion which is the only available resource of the poor, implies a good deal more both of energy and of feeling, than the lavish prodigality with which the rich man signs the cheques for which his head-gardener finds the use.
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