both from winds, sun, and dust, than which there can be nothing more desirable where streets are much frequented." The lime, too, has its medicinal virtues. "The berries, reduced to powder, cure dysentery and stop bleeding of the nose. The distilled water of the same is good against epilepsy, apoplexy, vertigo, palpitation of the heart, and gravel, and I am told the juice of the leaves fixes colours." To this may be added what Evelyn does not seem to have known, that linden leaves, dried and placed in the tea-pot, make a tea which is highly sodorific. In Germany, the popular cure for influenza, catarrh, or cold in the head, is to lie quietly in bed for four-and-twenty hours and drink copiously of hot 'Linden Thee."" The same remedy is common in France.

The chesnut, perhaps, during the short season at the end of May and beginning of June, the most beautiful of the trees that adorn the English landscape, the white blossoming hawthorn not excepted, is the only one of Evelyn's favourites which requires further notice. He is warm in praise of its beauty as a growing tree and of its uses as timber. "He observed," he says, "that this tree is so prevalent against cold, that where they stand, they preserve other trees from the injuries of the severest frost. I am sure that, being planted in hedgerows, and for avenues to our country houses,

they are a magnificent and a royal ornament." This is an opinion in which most Londoners, who remember the glories of Bushy Park in early summer, will cordially coincide. Even the fruit, bitter as that of the horse chesnut is, finds favour in his philosophic eyes. "We give," he says, "that fruit to our swine in England which is among the delicacies of princes in other countries, and of better nourishment to husbandmen than kohl (cabbage) and rusty bacon, yea, or beans to boot. . . . The bread made of chesnut flour is exceedingly nutritive, and makes women well complexioned, as I have read in a good author." What may interest the ladies, if golden locks be in fashion, and the dark possessors of locks that are not golden, desire to appear as other than they are, is the fact, given on Evelyn's authority alone, that "a decoction of the rind of the chesnut tree tinctures hair of a golden colour. This," he adds, without the gift of prophecy to lead him to 1871, "is esteemed a beauty in some countries.”

Evelyn was justified in the pride which he took in his Sylva, and in the additions which he continued to make to it from time to time, until nearly the close of his life. In his Dedication of the third edition to Charles II., sixteen years after its first publication, he says, with pardonable selfappreciation, "I need not acquaint your majesty

how many millions of timber trees (besides infinite others) have been propagated and planted throughout your vast dominions at the instigation and by the sole direction of this work; because your gracious majesty has been pleased to own it publicly for my encouragement; who, in all that I here pretend to say, delivers only those precepts which your majesty has put in practice, as has (like another Cyrus), by your own royal example, exceeded all your predecessors in the plantations you have made, beyond (I dare assert it) all the monarchs of this nation since the conquest of it. And, indeed, what more august, what more worthy of your majesty, or more becoming our imitation, than, whilst you are thus solicitous for the public good, we pursue your majesty's great example, and by cultivating our decaying woods, contribute to your power as to our own greatest wealth and safety."

It is only within our own time—within a very few years that Evelyn's far-sighted anxiety for the continuous production of material for the building of a great navy to maintain British supremacy in all the seas of the world has become a thing of the past, a matter with which the present generation has no concern. "Hearts of oak" are no longer synonymes or our ships or our sailors. Iron, not oak, is the monarch of the seas. None the less, however, is Evelyn's glory or the gratitude we owe him. For

nearly two hundred years his book did noble service in the mode he designed; and in other modes also. He taught the rural aristocracy a duty they owed to themselves and their country; and since his time they have well performed it. Nowhere in the world are there such fine parks and plantations as there are in England.

Sayes Court, where the amiable philosopher so long lived and cultivated his trees, his shrubs, and his salads-or, as he calls them, "acetaria "-has long ceased to be rural, and is mural as far as houses and streets can make it so. Wotton, however, still remains, and an Evelyn still resides in it, to cultivate the grounds, and maintain the fair fame of an ancient and honourable family.

MR. PLANT, THE ENGLISH PEASANT.

F there be any class of the English people pre-eminently unknown to itself and to all other classes, it is that of the farm-labourer. The squire or other

great landed proprietor of the neighbourhood knows the labourers, after a certain fashion, as he knows his cattle; but of the labourer's mind he has as little idea as he has of that of the animal which he bestrides in the hunting-field. He knows the peasant to be a useful drudge, like the horse that draws the plough, but unlike the horse, feels and deplores that he will be a burden upon the poor-rates, either present or prospective. Furthermore, he suspects him to be a poacher; and in his capacity of magistrate deals out the harshest justice (or injustice) towards him, if the suspicion ever comes to be verified. The squire's lady, and the clergyman's lady, and the fair matrons and spinsters of the Dorcas Society, or managers of the Penny Clothing Club, know the labourer's wife as the grateful and