mising to rear me one of the same sort, after a method of his own discovering, which he assures me brings them to perfection twice as fast as the dawdling modes of the new school. Nothing like an old gardener after all! above all if he be as kind, as enthusiastic, and as clever, as Matthew Shore. NOTE-The exceedingly rude state of horticultural science in England at a time when the sister art of domestic Architecture was perhaps more flourishing than at any period of our history, cannot be better illustrated than by the following curious and authentic paper, read in 1794 to the Antiquarian Society, and subsequently printed, one can hardly call it published, in the twelfth volume of the "Archæologia," where it has lain most honourably buried amongst "Essays on the Venta Icenorum," and "Letters on the Pusey Horn," for these thirty years. (N. B. The copy of that venerable quarto in which I discovered it was still uncut.) I insert it here because I think my readers will be as much amused as I have been at the odd notions of gardening entertained by our ancestors, especially by the green-houses built in the shade, and the rabbit warren in the midst of the flower gardens. What would the Horticultural Society say to such doings? "A short account of several gardens near London, with remarks on some particulars wherein they excel or are deficient, upon a view of them in December, 1691. Communicated to the Society by the Rev. Dr. Hamilton, Vice President, from an original MS. in his possession. "1. Hampton Court Garden is a large plot, environed with an iron palisade round about next the Park, laid all in walks, grass-plots and borders. Next to the house, some flat and broad beds are set with narrow rows of dwarf box, in figures like lace patterns. In one of the lesser gardens is a large greenhouse divided into several rooms, and all of them with stoves under them, and fire to keep a perpetual heat. In these there are no orange, or lemon trees, or myr tles, or any greens, but such tender foreign ones as need continual warmth. "2. Kensington gardens are not great nor abounding with fine plants. The orange, lemon, myrtles, and what other trees they had there in summer, were all removed to Mr. Loudon's and Mr. Wise's green-house at Brompton Park, a little mile from them. But the walks and grass laid very fine, and they were digging up a plot of four or five acres to enlarge their garden. 3. The Queen Dowager's garden at Hammersmith has a good green-house, with a high erected front to the south whence the roof falls backward. The house is well stored with greens of common kinds; but the queen not being for curious plants or flowers, they want of the most curious sorts of greens, and in the garden there is little of value but wall trees; though the gardener there. Monsieur Hermon Van Guine, is a man of great skill and industry, having raised great numbers of orange and lemon trees by inoculation, with myrtles, Roman bayes, and other greens of pretty shapes, which he has to dispose of. "4. Beddington garden, at present in the hands of the Duke of Norfolk, but belonging to the family of Carew, has in it the best orangery in England. The orange and lemon trees there grow in the ground, and have done so near one hundred years, as the gardener, an aged man, said he believed. There are a great number of them, the house wherein they are being above two hundred feet long; they are most of them thirteen feet high and very full of fruit, the gardener not having taken off so many flowers this last summer as usually others do. He said he gathered off them at least ten thousand oranges this last year. The heir of the family being but about five years of age, the trustees take care of the orangery, and this year they built a new house over them. There are some myrtles growing among them, but they look not well for want of trimming. The rest of the garden is all out of order, the orangery being the gardener's chief care; but it is capable of being made one of the best gardens in England, the soil being very agreeable, and a clear silver stream running through it "5 Chelsea Physic Garden has great variety of plants both in and out of greenhouses. Their perennial green hedges and rows of different coloured herbs are very pretty, and so are their banks set with shades of herbs in the Irish-stitch way, but many plants of the garden were not in so good order as might be expected, and as would have been answerable to other things in it. After I had been there I heard that Mr. Watts the keeper of it was blamed for his neglect, and that he would be removed. "6. My Lord Ranelagh's garden being but lately made, the plants are but small, but the plats, borders, and walks, are curiously kept and elegantly designed, having the advantage of opening into Chelsea College walks. The kitchen garden there lies very fine, with walks and sents, one of which being large and covered was then under the hands of a curious painter. The house is very fine within, all the rooms being wainscoted with Norway oak, and all the chimneys adorned with carving, as in the council chamber in Chelsea College. "7. Arlington Garden being now in the hands of my Lord of Devonshire, is a fair plat, with good walks both airy and shady. There are six of the greatest earthern pots that are any where else, being at least two feet over within the edge, but they stand abroad, and have nothing in them but the tree holy-oke, an indifferent plant which grows well enough in the ground. Their green-house is very well and their green-vard excels; but their greens were not so bright and clean as farther off in the country, as if they suf fered something from the smutty air of the town. "8. My Lord Fauconberg's Garden at Sutton Court has several pleasant walks and apartments in it; but the upper garden next the house is too irregular and the bowling-green too little to be commended. The green-house is very well made, but ill set. It is di vided into three rooms, and very well furnished with good greens; but it is so placed that the sun shines not on the plants in winter when they most need its beams, the dwelling-house standing betwixt the sun and it. The maze or wilderness there, is very pretty, being set all with greens, with a cypress arbour in the middle supported with a well-wrought timber frame; of late it grows thin at the bottom by their let ting the fir-trees grow without their reach unclipped. The enclosure, wired in for white pheasants and partridges, is a fine apartment, especially in summer when the bones of Italian bayes are set out, and the timber walk with vines on the side is very fine when the blew pots are on the pedestals on the top of it, and so is the first pond with the greens at the head of it. 9. Sir William Temple being lately gone to live at his house in Farnham, his garden and green-house at West Sheen, where he has lived of late years, are not so well kept as they have been; many of his orange-trees and other greens being given to Sir John Temple his brother at East Sheen, and other gentlemen; but his greens that are remaining (being as good a stock as most green-houses have) are very fresh and thriving, the room they stand in suiting well with them, and being well contrived, if it be no defect in it that the floor is a foot at least within the ground, as is also the floor of the dwelling-house. He had attempted to have orange-trees to grow in the ground (as at Beddington), and for that purpose had enclosed a square of ten feet wide, with a low brick wall, and sheltered them with wood, but they would not do. | His orange-trees, in summer, stand not in any particular square or enclosure, under some shelter, as most others do, but are disposed on pedestals of Portland stone at equal distance, on a board over against a south wall, where are his best fruit and fairest walk. neither is the wall carried by a line either on the top or sides, but runs like an ordinary park wall, built as the ground goes. He built a good green-house, but set it so that the hills in winter keep the sun from it, so that they place their greens in a house on higher ground, not built for that purpose. His dwellinghouse stands very low, surrounded with great hills; and yet they have no water but what is forced from a deep well into a waterhouse, where they are furnished by pipes at pleasure. 10. Sir Henry Capeil's Garden at Kew, has as curious greens, and is as well kept as any about London. His two Lentiscus trees (for which he paid forty pounds to Versprit) are said to be the best in England, not only of their sort but of greens. He has four white striped hollies, about four feet above their cases, kept round and regular, which cost him five pounds a tree this last year, and six laurustinuses he has, with large round equal heads, which are very flowery, and make a fine show. His orange trees and other choice greens stand out in summer in two walks, about fourteen feet wide, enclosed with a timber frame about seven feet high, and set, with silver firs hedge-wise, which are as high as the frame, and this to secure them from wind and tempest, and sometimes from the scorching sun. His terrace-walk, bare in the middle, and grass on either side, with a hedge of rue on one side next a low wall, and a row of dwarf trees on the other, shows very fine, and so do from thence his yew-hedges with trees of the same, at equal distance, kept in pretty shapes with tonsure. His flowers and fruits are of the best, for the advan-ons, which have very large ripe fruit on them. tage of which two parallel walls, about fourteen feet high, were now raised and almost finished. If the ground were not a little irregular, it would excel in other points as well as in furniture. "11. Sir Stephen Fox's Garden at Chiswick, being but of five years' standing, is brought to great perfection for the time. It excels for a fair gravel-walk betwixt two yew-hedges with rounds and spines of the same, all under smooth tonsure. At the far end of this garden, are two myrtle hedges that cross the garden; they are about three feet high, and covered in winter with painted board cases. The other gardens are full of flowers and salleting, and the walls well clad. The green-house is well built, well set, and well furnished. It is 15. The Archbishop of Canterbury's Garden at Lambeth, has little in it but walks, the late Archbishop not delighting in one, but they are now making them better, and they have already a green-house, one of the finest and costliest about the town. of three rooms, the middle having a stove under it, the foresides of the rooms are almost all glass, the roof covered with lead, the whole part (to adorn the building) rising gavel-wise higher than the rest; but it is placed so near Lambeth Church that the sun shines most on it in winter after eleven o'clock; a fault owned by the gardener but not thought on by the contrivers. Most of the greens are oranges and lem "16. Dr. Uvedale, of Enfield, is a great lover of plants, and having an extraordinary art in managing them, is become master of the greatest and choicest collection of exotic greens that is, perhaps, any where in this land. His greens take up six or seven houses or roomsteads. His orange trees and largest myrtles fill up his biggest house, and another house is filled with myrtles of a less size, and these more nice and curious plants that need closer keeping are in warmer rooms, and some of them stoved when he thinks fit. His flowers are choice, his stock numerous, and his culture of them very methodical and curious; but to speak of the garden, in the whole it does not lie fine, to please the eye, his delight and care lying more in the ordering particular plants, than in the pleasing view and form of his garden. "17. Dr. Tillotson's Garden near Enfield, is a pleasurable place for walks, and some good walls there are too; but the tall aspen trees, and the many ponds in the heart of it are not so agreeable. He has two houses for greens, but had few in them, all the best being removed to Lambeth. The house is moated about. "12. Sir Thomas Cook's Garden at Hackney is very large, and not so fine at present, because of his intending to be at three thousand pounds charge with it this next summer, as his gardener said. There are two green-houses in it, but the greens are not extraordinary, for one of the roofs being made a receptacle for water, overcharged with weight, fell down last year upon the greens, and made a great destruction among the trees and pots. In one part of it is a warren con- 18. Mr. Evelin has a pleasant villa at Deptford, taining about two acres, very full of coneys, though a fine garden for walks and hedges (especially his there was but a couple put in a few years since. holly, one which he writes of in his Sylva.) and a There is a pond or mote round about them, and on pretty little green-house with an indifferent stock in the outside of that a brick wall four feet high, both it. In his garden he has four large round Philaneas which I think will not keep them within their com-smooth-clipt, raised on a single stalk from the ground, pass. There is a large fish-pond lying on the south to a brick wall, which is finely clad with philarea. Water brought from far in pipes furnishes his several ponds as they want it. 13. Sir Josiah Childs's plantations of walnut and other trees, at Wanstead, are much more worth seeing than his gardens, which are but indifferent. Besides the great number of fruit trees, he has planted his enclosures with great regularity: he has vast numbers of elms, ashes, limes, &c., planted in rows on Epping Forest. Before his outgate, which is above twelvescore distance from his house, are two large fish-ponds on the forest in the way from his house, with trees on either side lying betwixt them; in the middle of either pond is an island betwixt twenty and thirty yards over, and in the middle of each a house, the one like the other. They are said to be well stocked with fish, and so they had need to be if they cost him five thousand pounds, as it is said they did; as also that his plantations cost twice as much. a fashion now much used. Part of his garden is very woody and shaded for walking; but his garden, not being walled, has little of the best fruits. "19. Mr. Watts's house and garden made near Enfield are new; but the garden, for the time, is very fine, and large and regularly laid out, with a fair fishpond in the middle. He built a green-house this summer, with three rooms, (somewhat like the Archbishop of Canterbury's) the middle with a stove under it, and a sky-light above, and both of them of glass on the foreside, with shutters within, and the roof finely covered with Irish slate. But this fine house is under the same fault with three before, (numbers 8, 14, 15): they built it in summer and thought not of winter; the dwelling-house on the south side interposing betwixt the sun and it, now when its beams should refresh plants. "20. Brompton Park Garden, belonging to Mr. Loudon and Mr. Wise, has a large long green-house, the front all glass and board, the north side brick. Here 14. Sir Robert Clayton has great plantations at the king's greens, which were in summer at Kensing Marden in Surrey, in a soil not very benign to plants, ton, are placed, but they take but little room in combut with great charge he forces nature to obey him.parison of their own. Their garden is chiefly a nur His gardens are big enough, but strangely irregular, sery for all sorts of plants, of which they are very his chief walk not being level, but rising in the mid: full. dle and falling much more at one end than the other; "21. Mr Rayntan's Garden at Endfield, is observa ble for nothing but his green-house, which he has had for many years. His orange, lemon, and myrtle trees, are as full and furnished as any in cases. He has a myrtle cut in shape of a chain, that is at least six feet high from the case, but the lower part is thin of leaves. The rest of the garden is very ordinary, and on the outside of his garden he has a warren, which makes the ground about his seat lie rudely, and sometimes the coneys work under the wall into the garden. 22. Mr. Richardson at East Barnet has a pretty garden with fine walks and good flowers; but the garden not being walled about, they have less summer fruit, yet are therefore the more industrious in managing the peach and apricot dwarf standards, which, they say, supply them plentifully with very good fruit. There is a good fish-pond in the middle of it, from which a broad gravel-walk leads to the highway, where a fair pair of broad gates, with a narrower on either side, open at the top to look through small bars, well wrought and well painted, are a great ornament to the garden. They have orange and lemon trees, but the wife and son being the managers of the garden (the husband being gouty and not minding it) they cannot prevail for a house for them other than a barn end. "23. Captain Foster's Garden at Lambeth has many curiosities in it. His green-house is full of fresh and flourishing plants, and before it is the finest striped holly hedge that perhaps is in England. He has many myrtles, not the greatest but of the most fanciful shapes that are any where else. He has a frame walk of timber covered with vines, which with others running on most of his walls without prejudice to his lower trees, yield him a deal of wine. Of flowers he has a good choice, and his Virginia and other birds in a great variety, with his glass hive, add much to the pleasure of his garden. "24. Monsieur Anthony Vesprit has a little garden of very choice things. His green-house has no great variety of plants, but what he has are of the best sort, and very well ordered. His oranges and lemons (fruit and tree) are extraordinary fair, and for lenticuses and Roman bayes he has choice above others. "25. Ricketts at Hoxton, has a large ground, and abundantly stocked with all manner of flowers, fruit trees and other garden plants, with lime trees which are now much planted; and for a sale garden, he has a very good green-house and well filled with fresh greens, besides which he has another room filled with greens in pots. He has a greater stock of Assyrian thyme than any body else, for besides many pots of it, he has beds abroad with plenty of roots which they cover with mats and straw in winter. He sells his things with the dearest, and not taking due care to have his plants prove well, he is supposed to have lost much custom. "26. Pearson has not near so large a ground as Ricketts (on whom he almost joins,) and therefore has not so many trees, but of flowers he has great choice, and of anemones he avers that he has the best about London, and sells them only to gentlemen. He has no green-house, yet has abundance of myrtle and striped philaneas, with oranges and other greens, which he keeps safe enough under sheds, sunk a foot within ground, and covered with straw. He has abundance of cypresses, which at three feet high, he sells for fourpence a piece to those who take any number. He is moderate in his prices, and accounted very honest in his dealings, which gets him much chapmanry. 27. Darby at Hoxton has but a little garden, but is master of several curious greens, that other sale gardeners want, and which he saves from cold and winter weather, in green-houses of his own making. His fritalaria crassa (a green) had a flower on it, of the breadth of a half-crown, like an embroidered star of several colours; I saw not the like any where, no, not at Dr. Uvedale's, though he has the same plant. He raises many striped hollies by inoculation, though Captain Foster grafts them as we do apple trees. He is very curious in propagating greens, but is dear with them. He has a folio paper book in which he has pasted the leaves and flowers of almost all manner of plants, which make a pretty show, and are more instructive than any cuts in herbals. 28. Clements at Mile-End has no bigger a garden than Darby, but has more greens, yet not of such curious sorts. He keeps them in a green-house made with a light charge. He has vines in many places, round old trees, which they wind about. He made wine this year of his white muscadine and white frontiniac, better I thought than any French white wine. He keeps a shop of seeds, and plants in pots next the street. J. GIBSON." Jan. 26, 1691. Archeologia, vol. xii. page 181. END OF OUR VILLAGE. BELFORD REGIS: SKETCHES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. PREFACE. In an Article on the last Volume of "Our Village," the courteous critic recommended, since I had taken leave of rural life, that I should engage lodgings in the next country town, and commence a series of sketches of the inhabitants; a class of the community which, whilst it forms so large a portion of our population, occupies so small a space in our literature, and amongst whom, more perhaps than amongst any other order of English society, may be traced the peculiarities, the prejudices, and the excellences of the national character. "Upon this hint I wrote;" and the present work would have been called simply "Our Market Town," had not an ingenious contemporary, by forestalling my intended title, compelled me to give to "my airy nothings, a local habitation and a name." It would not quite do to have two "Simon Pures" in the field, each asserting his identity and jostling for precedence; although I am so far from accusing Mr. Peregrine Reedpen (as the Frenchman did the ancients) of having stolen my best thoughts, that I am firmly of opinion, that were twenty writers to sit down at once to compose a book upon this theme, there would not be the slightest danger of their interfering with each other. Every separate work would bear the stamp of the author's mind, of his peculiar train of thought, and habits of observation. The subject is as inexhaustible as nature herself. One favour, the necessity of which has been pressed upon me by painful experience, I have to entreat most earnestly at the hands of my readers,—a favour the very reverse of that which story-tellers by profession are wont to implore! It is that they will do me the justice not to believe one word of these sketches *Our Town; or, Rough Sketches of Character, Manners, &c. By Peregrine Reedpen." 2 vols. London, 1834. from beginning to end. General truth of delineation I hope there is; but of individual portrait-painting, I most seriously assert that none has been intended, and none, I firmly trust, can be found. From this declaration I except, of course, the notes which consist professedly of illustrative anecdotes, and the paper on the Greek plays, which contains a feeble attempt to perpetuate one of the happiest recollections of my youth. Belford itself too, may, perhaps, be identified: for I do not deny having occasionally stolen some touches of local scenery from the beautiful town that comes so frequently before my eyes. But the inhabitants of Belford, the Stephen Lanes, the Peter Jenkinses and the King Harwoods, exist only in these pages; and if there should be any persons who, after this protest, should obstinately persist in mistaking for fact what the author declares to be fiction, I can only compare them to the sagacious gentleman mentioned in "The Spectator," who, upon reading "The Whole Duty of Man," wrote the names of different people in the village where he lived, at the side of every sin mentioned by the author, and with half-adozen strokes of his pen, turned the whole of that devout and pious treatise into a libel. Be more merciful to these slight sketches, gentle reader, and farewell! Three Mile Cross, Feb. 25, 1835. BELFORD REGIS. THE TOWN. ABOUT three miles to the north of our vil lage, (if my readers may be supposed to have heard of such a place,) stands the good town of Belford Regis. The approach to it, straight as a dart, runs along a wide and populous turnpike-road, (for, as yet, rail-ways are not,) all alive with carts and coaches, wagons and phaetons, horse people and foot people, sweeping rapidly or creeping lazily up and down the gentle undulations with which the Nobody can look at Belford from this point, without feeling that it is a very English and very charming scene: and the impression does not diminish on farther acquaintance. We see at once the history of the place, that it is an ancient borough town, which has re surface of the country is varied; and the borders, checkered by patches of common, rich with hedge-row timber, and sprinkled with cottages, and, I grieve to say, with that cottage pest, the beer-houses, and here and there enlivened by dwellings of more pretension and gentility become more thickly in-cently been extended to nearly double its forhabited as we draw nearer to the metropolis of the county; to say nothing of the three cottages all in a row, with two small houses detached, which a board affixed to one of them informs the passers-by is "Two-mile Cross;" or of those opposite neighbours, the wheelwrights and blacksmiths, about half a mile farther; or the little farm close to the pound; or the series of buildings called the Long Row, terminating at the end next the road with an old-fashioned and most picturesque public-house, with pointed roofs, and benches at the door, and round the large elm before it, -benches which are generally filled by thirsty wayfarers and wagoners, watering their horses, and partaking a more generous liquor themselves. Leaving these objects undescribed, no sooner do we get within a mile of the town, than our approach is indicated by successive market-gardens on either side, crowned, as we ascend the long hill on which the turnpikegate stands, by an extensive nursery-ground, gay with long beds of flowers, with trellised walks covered with creepers, with whole acres of flowering shrubs, and ranges of greenhouses, the glass glittering in the southern sun. Then the turnpike-gate, with its civil keeper then another public-house-then the I clear bright pond on the top of the hill, and then the rows of small tenements, with here and there a more ambitious single cottage standing in its own pretty garden, which forms the usual gradation from the country to the town. About this point, where one road, skirting the great pond and edged by small houses, diverges from the great southern entrance, and where two streets meeting or parting lead by separate ways down the steep hill to the centre of the town, stands a handsome mansion, surrounded by orchards and pleasuregrounds; across which is perhaps to be seen the very best view of Belford, with its long ranges of modern buildings in the outskirts, mingled with picturesque old streets; the venerable towers of St. Stephen's and St. Nicholas'; the light and tapering spire of St. John's; the huge monastic ruins of the abbey; the massive walls of the county jail; the great river winding along like a thread of silver; trees and gardens mingling amongst all; and the whole landscape enriched and lightened by the dropping elms of the foreground, adding an illusive beauty to the picture, by breaking the too formal outline, and veiling just exactly those parts which most require concealment. mer size; so that it unites, in no common degree, the old romantic irregular structures in which our ancestors delighted, with the handsome and uniform buildings which are the fashion now-a-days. I suppose that people are right in their taste, and that the modern houses are pleasantest to live in; but, beyond all question, those antique streets are the prettiest to look at. The occasional blending, too, is good. Witness the striking piece of street scenery, which was once accidentally forced upon my attention as I took shelter from a shower of rain in a shop, about ten doors up the right-hand side of Friar-street: the old vicarage-house of St. Nicholas', embowered in evergreens; the lofty town-hall, and the handsome modern house of my friend Mr. Beauchamp; the fine church-tower of St. Nicholas'; the picturesque piazza underneath; the jutting corner of Friar-street; the old irregular shops in the market-place, and the trees of the Forbury just peeping between, with all their varieties of light and shadow! It is a scene fit for that matchless painter of towns, Mr. Jones. I went to the door to see if the shower were over, was caught by its beauty, and stood looking at it in the sunshine long after the rain had ceased. Then, again, for a piece of antiquity what can be more picturesque than the high, solitary bay-window in that old house in Milllane, garlanded with grapes, and hanging over the water, as if to admire its own beauty in that clear mirror? The projecting window is a picture in itself. Or, for a modern scene, what can surpass the High Bridge, on a sunshiny-day? The bright river, crowded with barges and small craft; the streets, and wharves, and quays, all alive with the busy and stirring population of the country and the town;-a combination of light and motion. In looking at a good view of the High Bridge at noon, you should seem to hear the bustle. I have never seen a more cheerful subject. Cheerfulness is, perhaps, the word that best describes the impression conveyed by the more frequented streets of Belford. It is not a manufacturing town, and its trade is solely that dependent on its own considerable population, and the demands of a thickly-inhabited neighbourhood; so that, except in the very centre of that trade, the streets where the principal shops are congregated, or on certain public occasions, such as elections, fairs, and markets, the stir hardly amounts to bustle. Neither is it a professed place of gaiety, like Cheltenham or Brighton; where London peo |