HIS MODE OF LIFE-PLANTING-PROPHECIES OF NEW METHODS AND NEW DISCOVERIES IN A FUTURE GENERATION.

TO THE HON. H. S. CONWAY.

STRAWBERRY HILL, Aug. 29, 1748.

DEAR HARRY,-Whatever you may think, a campaign at Twickenham furnishes as little matter for a letter as an abortive one in Flanders. I can't say indeed that my generals wear black wigs, but they have long fullbottomed hoods which cover as little entertainment to the full.

There's General my Lady Castlecomer, and General my Lady Dowager Ferris! Why, do you think I can extract more out of them than you can out of Hawley or Honeywood? Your old women dress, go to the Duke's levee, see that the soldiers cock their hats right, sleep after dinner, and soak with their ledcaptains till bed-time, and tell a thousand lies of what they never did in their youth. Change hats for headclothes, the rounds for visits, and led-captains for toadeaters, and the life is the very same. In short, these are the people I live in the midst of, though not with; and it is for want of more important histories that I have wrote to you seldom; not, I give you my word, from the least negligence. My present and sole occupation is planting, in which I have made great progress and talked very learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now and then a lettuce run to seed overturns all my botany, as I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the de

liberation with which trees grow, is extremely inconvenient to my natural impatience. I lament living in so barbarous an age, when we are come to so little perfection in gardening. I am persuaded that a hundred and fifty years hence it will be as common to remove oaks a hundred and fifty years old, as it is now to transplant tulip roots. I have even begun a treatise or panegyric on the great discoveries made by posterity in all arts and sciences, wherein I shall particularly descant on the great and cheap convenience of making trout-rivers-one of the improvements which Mrs. Kerwood wondered Mr. Hedges would not make at his country-house, but which was not then quite so common as it will be. I shall talk of a secret for roasting a wild boar and a whole pack of hounds alive, without hurting them, so that the whole chase may be brought up to table; and for this secret, the Duke of Newcastle's grandson, if he can ever get a son, is to give a hundred thousand pounds. Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds, tame tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses

It is worth noting that these predictions that "it will be common to remove oaks a hundred and fifty years old " has been verified many years since; at least, if not in the case of oaks, in that of large elms and ashtrees. In 1850 Mr. Paxton offered to a Committee of the House of Commons to undertake to remove the large elm which was standing on the ground proposed for the Crystal Palace of the Exhibition of 1851, and his master, the Duke of Devonshire, has since that time removed many trees of very large size from one part of his grounds to another; and similarly the "making of trout-rivers" has been carried out in many places, even in our most distant colonies, by Mr. Buckland's method of raising the young fish from roe in boxes and distributing them in places where they were needed.

to see all that is doing in China, with a thousand other toys, which we now look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would laugh in one's face for staring at, while they are offering rewards for perfecting discoveries, of the principles of which we have not the least conception! If ever this book should come forth, I must expect to have all the learned in arms. against me, who measure all knowledge backward: some of them have discovered symptoms of all arts in Homer; and Pineda,1 had so much faith in the accomplishments of his ancestors, that he believed Adam understood all sciences but politics. But as these great champions for our forefathers are dead, and Boileau. not alive to hitch me into a verse with Perrault, I am determined to admire the learning of posterity, especially being convinced that half our present knowledge sprung from discovering the errors of what had formerly been called so. I don't think I shall ever make any great discoveries myself, and therefore shall be content to propose them to my descendants, like my Lord Bacon,2 who, as Dr. Shaw says very prettily

Pineda was a Spanish Jesuit of the seventeenth century, and a voluminous writer.

It is a singular thing that this most eminent man should be so constantly spoken of by a title which he never had. His first title in the peerage was Baron Verulam; his second, on a subsequent promotion, was Viscount St. Albans; yet the error is as old as Dryden, and is defended by Lord Macaulay in a sentence of pre-eminent absurdity: "Posterity has felt that the greatest of English philosophers could derive no accession of dignity from any title which power could bestow, and, in defiance of letters-patent, has obstinately refused to degrade Francis Bacon into Viscount St. Albans." But, without stopping to discuss the propriety of representing a British peerage, honestly earned, and, in his case as Lord Chancellor, necessarily conferred, as a "degradation," the