ing on an oak. Diogenes Laertius classes the Druids with the Gymnosophists of Chaldea, the Bramins of India, and the Magi of the Persians.

II.

The power of association gives a charm to every thing. Hence particular places are adapted to the consideration of particular subjects. When leaning near the monuments of neglected genius, our thoughts naturally revert to the conspiracy of low societies. against it; to the relative fates of Corregio, Camöens, Cervantes, Chatterton, and Proctor: to the reluctance, with which almost all governments reward talent; and to the sublimity, resulting from antiquity.

When we behold public buildings, we revert to the application of works of art to the purposes of public benefit when we visit ruins, we behold, as it were, the crumbling of empires: in view of palaces, we compare the virtues of Trajan, Mauritius and of Tiberius II. with those of Alfred, Piastus, Stanislaus and Washington. When sitting in a bower, our thoughts sometimes recur to the want of poetic genius in Plato, Cicero, Pliny and Burke; contrasting their oratorical qualifications with those belonging to poetry and music. We compare the relative merits of Pliny, Balzac, Melmoth, Gray and Pope as letter-writers : we trace the analogy between painting and sculpture: we associate the merits of Angelo and Salvator Rosa with those of Dante and Milton: and we mark the resemblance, subsisting between the genius of Ariosto, Chaucer, and Spenser. Then we revert to the cha

racter of an agreeable melancholy; to the uses of monasteries; to the misfortunes of Rousseau; to the style of Albani; to the pleasures of the Golden Age; and the music of the golden spheres.

In spring we frequently leave beds of perfume, to `dwell in imagination on the plains of Tartary; the deserts of Ethiopia; the solitudes of America, and the snows of Nova Zembla. We wage an imaginary war with glory and ease; sometimes siding with one, sometimes encouraging the other; the mind delighting to unite, into one crown of beauty, virtue, happiness, and successful endeavour.

In summer we stand on the arches of a bridge, gazing on a cottage. The smoke curls above the copse; the voices of children swell upon the gale ; the sun sinks in peace, and the whole scene is a scene of repose. Then subjects, allied to domestic enjoyments, steal upon the imagination, and soothe us to tranquillity.

In autumn we read, in the decline of the year, the retirement of statesmen to a private life. Xenophon, Scipio, Sully, and Bernstoff, rise before the sight; we contrast Virgil's Corycian Swain with the Miser of Horace; and Juvenal's Sejanus with Claudian's Old Man of Verona.

In winter we read the benefits of vicissitude; we honour, as it were, the state of virtuous poverty; we trace the prevailing causes of our errors and misfortunes; we form a true estimate of the world's opinion; we reflect on the ease, with which the mind accommodates itself to circumstances; and in the corrected progress of the seasons, perceiving their

analogy with the life of man, we anticipate the period, when our epitaphs will testify, "Et Ego in Arcadia."

III.

Sometimes the most simple objects will give rise to recollections, which become the causes of many interesting reflections. Thus I never see the fragment of Pompey's pillar, which a friend brought me from Alexandria, but I recal the history, in miniature, of that celebrated city. On the banks of the Severn, I have recalled the image of Sabrina and Comus; and while at Merthyr, (abounding in furnaces and iron mines), it were almost impossible to forbear associating it with the regions of Baliol and Moloch :

Seest thou yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,
The seat of desolation, void of light,

Save what the glimmering of the livid flames
Casts pale and dreadful?

A cottage in ruins, belonging to an old French officer, who, after sharing the fortunes of Charles XII., led the life of a peasant in Finland, affected St. Pierre, more than all the palaces of St. Petersburgh. The sight of an old man, playing upon a harp, recalled to the recollection of Gray the massacre of the minstrels by Edward I.: and to this incidental circumstance are we indebted, for one of the finest odes in the English language. The view of a picturesque cottage at Chéneviere, also, by producing many delightful associations in the mind of Marmontel, was the origin of his writing the tale of the Shepherdess of the Alps,

IV.

Why does Emilius regard the ice plant with delight? Because he was accustomed to see it in the hothouse of Eugenia, and to witness the pleasure with which she contemplated the icy surface of its leaves, which appeared in the sun, like chrystal; while its white, hairy, corolla challenged but little observation. The cereus grandiflorus! (introduced from Peru in 1690). This plant produces finely scented flowers in July. These flowers open between seven and eight in the evening; are full in blossom by eleven; and at four in the morning, they hang their heads, fade, and die. They shed an exquisite perfume, and scent the air to a considerable distance. The calyx, when expanded, is nearly a foot in diameter; and the whole appearance of the corolla is magnificent. Eugenia died in the blossom of her perfections: and her lover, associating her with this beautiful flower, never sees it in a hothouse, but he remembers his Eugenia, with a melancholy yet not unpleasing regret.

The plants, most interesting to this elegant scholar, are those, which he admired in the days of his boyhood; those, which have charmed him in remote provinces, where he least expected to find them ;and those which he has beheld in the society of persons, whom he has esteemed and loved. They never fail to awaken agreeable associations of the past; and it does not depend on their beauty, or their fragrance, whether they please him or not. He has, therefore, often surprized those,

with whom he has been walking, when, iu the midst of an interesting conversation, he has sud-denly stooped to pick up a flower, and examine it with an attention, that would indicate an expectation, that it possessed some peculiar organization. Many of these associations he would find some difficulty to trace.-Why does the common heart's-ease, the bear's-foot, and the polyanthus, interest him more than other flowers, much more rare and beautiful?Because they decorated the garden of a cottage, belonging to an old woman, whom he loved in his childhood. The violet, so beautiful and so odoriferous in itself, is still increased in interest by remembering how many a tranquil hour, he has devoted to the gathering bunches of it under the hedgerows, when a boy. For years, he was accustomed to see the purple digitalis,-so celebrated for its medicinal uses,-in all the lanes and hedges, without caring to examine its calyx or internal structure. But one day, visiting the garden of a gentleman, near Winchester, in which were assembled thirteen species of that plant: he has loved to recal the memory of them all, whenever he has seen the purple species in the fields, or along the side of a road. In this collection, they were arranged by the side of each other; and all in blossom. Besides the indigenous plant, there were the small yellow from the south of Europe; the great yellow from Switzerland; the minor, the thapsi, the small-flowered, and willowleaved, from Spain; the broad-lipped from Greece; the woolly from Hungary; the blushing and the iron-coloured from Italy; and the shrubby from the