avelled with Cornelius van Baerle's solitary flower in _La Tulipe
Noire_, and won the prize of 100,000 florins offered for a blossom
of pure nigritude by the Horticultural Society of Haarlem. Hence the
addition of the Tulipa Nigra Rosa Baerleensis to the list of desirable
bulbs. Dumas puts into the mouth of Cornelius a very charming song
of the tulip:--

Nous sommes les filles du feu secret,
Du feu qui circule dans les veines de la terre;
Nous sommes les filles de l'aurore et de la rosee,
Nous sommes les filles de l'air,
Nous sommes les filles de l'eau;
Mais nous sommes avant tout les filles du ciel.

The Dutch are now wholly practical. Their reputation as gardeners has
become a commercial one, resting upon the fortunate discovery that the
tulip and the hyacinth thrive in the sandy soil about Haarlem. For
flowers as flowers they seem to me to care little or nothing. Their
cottages have no pretty confusion of blossoms as in our villages. You
never see the cottager at work among his roses; once his necessary
labours are over, he smokes and talks to his neighbours: to grow
flowers for aesthetic reasons were too ornamental, too unproductive
a hobby. AEsthetically the Dutch are dead, or are alive only in the
matter of green paint, which they use with such charming effect on
their houses, their mills and their boats. What is pretty is old--as
indeed is the case in our own country, if we except gardens. Modern
Dutch architecture is without attraction, modern Delft porcelain a
thing to cry over.

If any one would know how an old formal Dutch garden looked, there is
a model one at the back of the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam. But the art
is no more practised. A few circular beds in the lawn, surrounded
by high wire netting--that is for the most part the modern notion
of gardening. In an interesting report of a visit paid to the
Netherlands and France in 1817 by the secretary of the Caledonia
Horticultural Society and some congenial companions, may be read
excellent descriptions of old Dutch gardening, which even then was
a thing of the past. Here is the account of a typical formal garden,
near Utrecht: "The large divisions of the garden are made by tall and
thick hedges of beech, hornbeam, and oak, variously shaped, having
been tied to frames and thus trained, with the aid of the shears, to
the desired form. The smaller divisions are made by hedges of yew and
box, which in thickness and density resem