s not take, like other
trees, a twisted form from the action of the winds. Except the cedar of
Lebanon, no tree is so remarkable for the stoutness of its limbs: they
do not exactly spring from the trunk, but divide from it; and thus it
is sometimes difficult to know which is stem and which is branch. The
twisted branches of the oak, too, add greatly to its beauty; and the
horizontal direction of its boughs, spreading over a large surface,
completes the idea of its sovereignty over all the trees of the forest.
Even a decayed oak,--

"------dry and dead,
Still clad with reliques of its trophies old,
Lifting to heaven its aged hoary head,
Whose foot on earth Hath got but feeble hold--"

--even such a tree as Spenser has thus described is strikingly
beautiful: decay in this case looks pleasing. To such an oak Lucan
compared Pompey in his declining state.

_The Cedar_.

The cedar of Lebanon, though it has been introduced into many parts of
England as an ornamental tree, and has thriven well, has not yet been
planted in great numbers for the sake of its timber. No doubt it is more
difficult to rear, and requires a far richer soil than the pine and the
larch; but the principal objection to it has been the supposed slowness
of its growth, although that does not appear to be very much greater
than in the oak. Some cedars, which have been planted in a soil well
adapted to them, at Lord Carnarvon's, at Highclere, have grown with
extraordinary rapidity. Of the cedars planted in the royal garden
at Chelsea, in 1683, two had, in eighty-three years, acquired a
circumference of more than twelve feet, at two feet from the ground,
while their branches increased over a circular space forty feet in
diameter. Seven-and-twenty years afterwards the trunk of the largest one
had extended more than half a foot in circumference; which is probably
more than most oaks of a similar age would do during an equal period.
The surface soil in which the Chelsea cedars throve so well is not by
any means rich; but they seem to have been greatly nourished from a
neighbouring pond, upon the filling up of which they wasted away.

Various specimens of the cedar of Lebanon are mentioned as having
attained a very great size in England. One planted by Dr. Uvedale, in
the garden of the manor-house at Enfield, about the middle of the
seventeenth century, had a girth of fourteen feet in 1789; eight feet
of the top of it had been blown down by the