e volumes
was published some time before the outbreak of the Great
Railway Mania of that and the following year.

[Illustration: BUBBLERS' ARMS--DESPAIR--FROM A PRINT IN THE COLLECTION OF
E. HAWKINS, ESQ.]

[Illustration: CONRAD GESNER.]

THE TULIPOMANIA.

Quis furor, o cives!--_Lucan_.

The tulip,--so named, it is said, from a Turkish word, signifying a
turban,--was introduced into western Europe about the middle of the
sixteenth century. Conrad Gesner, who claims the merit of having brought
it into repute,--little dreaming of the commotion it was shortly
afterwards to make in the world,--says that he first saw it in the year
1559, in a garden at Augsburg, belonging to the learned Counsellor
Herwart, a man very famous in his day for his collection of rare exotics.
The bulbs were sent to this gentleman by a friend at Constantinople, where
the flower had long been a favourite. In the course of ten or eleven years
after this period, tulips were much sought after by the wealthy,
especially in Holland and Germany. Rich people at Amsterdam sent for the
bulbs direct to Constantinople, and paid the most extravagant prices for
them. The first roots planted in England were brought from Vienna in 1600.
Until the year 1634 the tulip annually increased in reputation, until it
was deemed a proof of bad taste in any man of fortune to be without a
collection of them. Many learned men, including Pompeius de Angelis and
the celebrated Lipsius of Leyden, the author of the treatise "De
Constantia," were passionately fond of tulips. The rage for possessing
them soon caught the middle classes of society, and merchants and
shopkeepers, even of moderate means, began to vie with each other in the
rarity of these flowers and the preposterous prices they paid for them. A
trader at Harlaem was known to pay one-half of his fortune for a single
root, not with the design of selling it again at a profit, but to keep in
his own conservatory for the admiration of his acquaintance.

One would suppose that there must have been some great virtue in this
flower to have made it so valuable in the eyes of so prudent a people as
the Dutch; but it has neither the beauty nor the perfume of the
rose--hardly the beauty of the "sweet, sweet-pea;" neither is it as
enduring as either. Cowley, it is true, is loud in its praise. He says--

"The tulip next appeared, all over gay,
But wanton, full of pride, and full of play