site of Rome early, since it sheltered the wolf which suckled the founders of the city. This is a kind of evidence, however, which M. de Candolle avoids, and he does not mention that Bacchus grew fat on the succulent fig, and that the same heathen deity promised a crown to a maiden, whose confidence he afterwards abused by twisting the hard calyx of the pomegranate into the likeness of a kingly crown,' and then changing the poor girl, who had died of grief, into a pomegranate tree.

In the time of Cæsar most of the houses in Rome had gardens attached to them, in which grew, for the sake of their beauty, shade, or fame, such trees and shrubs as the pine, plane, box, and bay. The influx of plants into England at that time included, besides those already named, the vine, peach, medlar, fig, walnut, and others, including the mulberry. If we may indulge in a brief historical narrative, the plants which the civilised Romans introduced to our shores were afterwards destroyed and trodden under foot by the tribes of northmen which followed them. It is probable that the country was not much richer in plants of utility and beauty during great part of the Middle Ages than it had been more than a thousand years before. War has proved a great distributor, and we owed to the crusades a considerable influx of plants, which were preserved with others from other sources in the gardens of the religious houses. At the close of the Middle Ages, when the era of great houses such as Hampton Court, Nonsuch, and Hatfield succeeded that of the fortresses in which the great barons and landowners had previously resided, a greater immigration of foreign plants took place than we have space to record in detail. Names of famous gardeners and planters will occur to the reader, such as that of Gerrard, of the Physic Garden in Holborn; Lord Bacon, of Gorhambury; Henry VIII. and his fruiterer, who commenced the Kentish orchards, and trained grapes, peaches, and apricots to a fourteen-feet wall at Nonsuch; Evelyn, who 'first taught gardeners to speak proper English ;' Tradescant, the traveller, one of Charles II.'s gardeners, who cultivated for his majesty the queen pine from Barbadoes; Bishop Compton, who grew at Fulham Palace the tulip tree, magnolia, deciduous cypress, and cedar of Lebanon ; Sir Hans Sloane, of the Chelsea Botanic Garden; the Duchess of Beaufort, of Badminton; and Jeanie Deans's Duke of Argyll, called by Horace Walpole the 'treemonger,' who planted his exotics at Whitton, near Hounslow.

It is singular that the most useful of our conifers, the larch, whose durability Pliny mentions, and which was used for many buildings and bridges at Rome, only reached this country early in the seventeenth century, and it remained practically unknown till the Duke of Athole used it for covering his hilltops between Blair Athol and Dunkeld. The story of more recent introductions would be a long one, since innumerable plants have reached this country in turn from the Mediterranean, North America, India, and elsewhere. Most of those we refer to were brought hither by the travellers of the last century, but besides these immigrations others on a far larger scale have since been due to the horticultural collectors who in quite recent years have filled our woods and shrubberies and flower borders, as well as our hothouses, with plants of all descriptions-hardy shrubs from the uplands of China and Japan, or of California and the Cape, as well as flowers and fruits from the tropics. The enormous sums spent upon the orchis alone assure us that this kind of immigration is not likely to abate, since wealth and good taste alike encourage it.

ART. VIII. The American Commonwealth. By JAMES BRYCE, M.P., Author of the Holy Roman Empire.' Three

volumes. 8vo. London: 1888.

WHOEVER Would do justice to the originality of Mr. Bryce's masterly work must compare the American 'Commonwealth' with M. de Tocqueville's 'Démocratie en 'Amérique.' This comparison is free from invidiousness, and is full of instruction. It is not odious because it does justice to the genius of the two authors, both endowed with rare, with equal, but with singularly different talents. It is instructive because it discovers the fundamental difference of works which have features of superficial, but in the main of misleading, similarity.

The essential difference between both the character and the work of the French and of the English writer becomes the more noticeable when we reflect that M. de Tocqueville and Mr. Bryce each enter on their labours with personal qualifications which have much in common. The French and the English critic of American institutions are both men of letters. Both are masters of a style which in its kind is admirable, both add to the highest literary culture the inestimable advantage of legal training. For M, de Tocque

ville and Mr. Bryce are both consummate legists; that is to say, thinkers whose practical knowledge of law prevents them from regarding it as a mere scheme of theoretical doctrines, and whose freedom from the intellectually corrupting influence of professional competition enables them to perceive that legal principles are something very different from a lot of practical rules to be picked up haphazard amidst the scramble for professional success. Of the debt, indeed, which our authors owe to their mastery of legal science, it is impossible to speak too strongly. American institutions are the work of lawyers, and will never be understood by any man unacquainted both with the theory and the practice of law.

To literary cultivation and to legal training both writers add a characteristic which it is hard to define in one phrase; we incline to describe it as preoccupation with the philosophy of statesmanship. M. de Tocqueville, it is true, the rareness of whose genius is equalled by its precocity, stepped into the first rank among political philosophers before he engaged in the struggle of politics. But he belonged to a generation and to a family whose thoughts were habitually turned towards the problems of statesmanship. Matters of high policy, the destinies of his country, the attitude which men of wisdom and of worth should take up towards the advances of democracy, were, we may be sure, questions debated in his presence from his earliest youth. He must have felt himself predestined by his talents and by his position to the public service of France. Mr. Bryce also has been from his youth a student of political philosophy. For nearly ten years he has stood in the first line of our younger statesmen. Every sentence of his book betrays, what he never himself obtrudes, his familiarity with the practice no less than with the theories of public life; and a work which (if we except a graceful dedication to two of Mr. Bryce's professorial colleagues) contains not a reference to his personal position, reminds every intelligent reader that it is the production of a public man who has held high office, and who in his defence of the Home Rule Bill of 1886 made the one contribution from the side of the Government towards the speculative solution of a great political problem.

M. de Tocqueville, again, and Mr. Bryce each treat their subject with the perfect seriousness and, as far as intention goes, with the complete fairness demanded for the discussion of a topic involving the permanent interests of mankind. Neither author writes without an element of bias. To state

this is to say no more than that they each of them are men. Nor in matters of practical speculation is absence of bias an absolute merit. Freedom from prejudice means want of sympathy, and a critic without sympathy must, human nature being what it is, be a critic without insight. Bias is a totally different thing from unfairness, and of unfairness both the English and the French publicist are incapable. Neither of them in dealing with their great topic would misstate a fact in order to support a doctrine, or would conceal a fact because it told against the writer's most cherished theories. 'Democracy in America' disappointed, as the 'American Commonwealth' will disappoint, both Democrats and Conservatives. People do not know what to make of a prophet who neither blesses nor curses. M. de Tocqueville's treatise perplexed the reactionary Conservatism of France no less than the Benthamite Radicalism of England; and the 'American Commonwealth' will puzzle Gladstonians as well as Conservatives. It is as little a manual of Home Rule as it is a plea for the maintenance of the Union. It, like the great French work with which we are comparing it, rises above the level of polemical literature.

If their own literary conscientiousness has preserved both M. de Tocqueville and Mr. Bryce from the vice of partisanship, they have both been singularly shielded from another error by the circumstances of their times. In neither case is criticism of American institutions disturbed by a cause which has falsified the judgement of more than one honest and acute observer-warmth of feeling excited by the struggle against slavery. In M. de Tocqueville's day the irrepressible conflict had not become a fight for life and death, and the contest, which in 1831 had hardly begun, has in 1889 come to its close. Parties in America are for the moment gigantic factions; there is nothing in their war-cries to arouse the emotions or threaten the impartiality of a foreign observer. To both our critics fortune has been kind: each has been able to analyse foreign institutions undisturbed by party sympathies; each has attained such a knowledge of a foreign land as few persons possess about the institutions of their own country; each has produced a monumental work which will be studied as long as the history of the United States or the future of democracy has interest for mankind.

Let no one, however, imagine that Mr. Bryce has taken up the work of M. de Tocqueville, and has in effect done little. more than bring Democracy in America' down to date. No idea can be more unfounded. Both authors, it is true,

treat of American democracy; but they differ in their attitude towards their subject, in the scope of their work, and in their method. This is a matter which needs and repays exami

nation.

'Le développement graduel de l'égalité des conditions est donc un fait providentiel, il en a les principaux caractères: il est universel, il est durable, il échappe chaque jour à la puissance humaine, tous les événements, comme tous les hommes, servent à son développement.... 'Le livre entier qu'on va lire a été écrit sous l'impression d'une sorte de terreur religieuse produite dans l'âme de l'auteur par la vue de cette révolution irrésistible qui marche depuis tant de siècles à travers tous les obstacles, et qu'on voit encore aujourd'hui s'avancer au milieu des ruines qu'elle a faites. . . .

Instruire la démocratie, ranimer, s'il se peut, ses croyances, purifier ses mœurs, régler ses mouvements, substituer peu à peu la science des affaires à son inexpérience, la connaissance de ses vrais intérêts à ses aveugles instincts; adapter son gouvernement aux temps et aux lieux; le modifier suivant les circonstances et les hommes: tel est le premier des devoirs imposé de nos jours à ceux qui dirigent la société.'

These sentences, taken from that noble sermon on democracy which forms the introduction to M. de Tocqueville's first work, and should be read and re-read in its entirety by anyone who wishes to understand the position of a great thinker and moralist, afford the key to his whole attitude. He was throughout life occupied with one question alone. The progress of democracy in France was the theme of his incessant and painful meditation. To determine the laws by which a democratic society is governed was the problem to the solution of which he devoted his unrivalled powers of analysis, and in later life his fully developed capacity for research. His two great works are merely two parts of the same inquiry, but in each the author approaches it from a different side. In the book which displays the marvellous capacities of his youth-the 'Democracy in America' was published before M. de Tocqueville reached the age of thirty he analyses democratic society in the country where modern democracy has reached its fullest developement. In the Ancien Régime' he analyses the condition of France with a view to determining the influences to which democracy -and 'democracy' in M. de Tocqueville's mouth means a condition of society, not a form of government-owes its existence.

Nor are M. de Tocqueville's motives for making democracy

*Tocqueville, 'De la Démocratie en Amérique,' tome premier, Intro. pp. 7, 8, 9,