Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

before it starts a new development. Just now even the enthusiastic and the young are trying to live in the past — a whole generation conservative in its youth. I suppose it is all right, but it seems to lack the generous impulses of the generation nourished on the teachings of Mill and Bright. How true it is that Liberalism is not a principle, but an attitude of mind ! And the old Greek pattern will start its long line forward again some day. Now that hope is over for me, the old times, with heir edifying lessons, interest me most ; and so I try to understand the evolution of the present as taught through knowledge of the past, rather than breathlessly to grasp the future. My mother was so kind and sensible with me. So many parents are apt to be irritated by daughters who bound forward in life as children pick flowers in a field, always thinking there are many more and much finer ones just a little further on. Though it is now little over a hundred years since Gilbert White died, his pictures of the change within his memory in the general condition of the poor, and of the improvement in agriculture, gardens and health, seem most strange. Leprosy still existed in Selborne, though it was much on the decline. He attributes this partly to improved food and partly to wearing clean linen instead of dirty woollen garments. As to the produce of a garden, he adds, ' Every middle-aged person of observa- tion may perceive, within his own memory, both in town and country, how vastly the consumption of vegetables is increased. Green stalls in cities now support multi- tudes in a comfortable state, while gardeners get fortunes. Potatoes have prevailed in this district, by means of premiums, within these twenty years only, and are much esteemed here now by the poor, who would scarce have ventured to taste them in the last reign. ' Our Saxon ancestors certainly had some sort of Cab- AUGUST 147 bage, because they call the month of February " Sprout- cale " ; but long after their days the cultivation of gardens was little attended to. The religious, being men of leisure, and keeping up a constant correspondence with Italy, were the first people among us who had gardens and fruit trees in any perfection, within the walls of their abbeys and priories. The barons neglected every pursuit that did not lead to war or tend to the pleasure of the chase.' It seems to me from this exceedingly probable that gardens declined very much in England after the Eefor- mation, and no doubt the eating of vegetables, like the eating of fish, may have been considered Popish. Even in my childhood I can remember that salad was rarely seen at any but the tables of the very wealthy, who had foreign cooks, and then it was covered with a rich cream sauce, full of mustard, which was supposed to make it digestible. This superstition of the day was pointedly brought forward in some letters I found of my grand- mother's to my father at Oxford, strongly recommending him to take mustard-seeds before his meals as very helpful to digestion.