issioners of Her Majesty's
Woods and Forests, "with a view of rendering them available to the
general good."

She hath left you all her walks,
Her private arbors and new planted orchards
On this side Tiber. She hath left them you
And to your heirs for ever; common pleasures
To walk abroad and recreate yourselves.

They contain a large Palm-house built in 1848.[036] The extent of glass
for covering the building is said to be 360,000 square feet. My
Mahomedan readers in Hindostan, (I hope they will be numerous,) will
perhaps be pleased to hear that there is an ornamental mosque in these
gardens. On each of the doors of this mosque is an Arabic inscription in
golden characters, taken from the Koran. The Arabic has been thus
translated:--

LET THERE BE NO FORCE IN RELIGION.
THERE IS NO OTHER GOD EXCEPT THE DEITY.
MAKE NOT ANY LIKENESS UNTO GOD.

The first sentence of the translation is rather ambiguously worded. The
sentiment has even an impious air: an apparent meaning very different
from that which was intended. Of course the original text _means_,
though the English translator has not expressed that meaning--"Let there
be no force _used_ in religion."

When William Cobbett was a boy of eleven years of age he worked in the
garden of the Bishop of Winchester at Farnham. Having heard much of Kew
gardens he resolved to change his locality and his master. He started
off for Kew, a distance of about thirty miles, with only thirteen pence
in his pocket. The head gardener at Kew at once engaged his services. A
few days after, George the Fourth, then Prince of Wales, saw the boy
sweeping the lawns, and laughed heartily at his blue smock frock and
long red knotted garters. But the poor gardener's boy became a public
writer, whose productions were not exactly calculated to excite the
merriment of princes.

Most poets have a painter's eye for the disposition of forms and
colours. Kent's practice as a painter no doubt helped to make him what
he was as a landscape-gardener. When an architect was consulted about
laying out the grounds at Blenheim he replied, "you must send for a
landscape-painter:" he might have added--"_or a poet_."

Our late Laureate, William Wordsworth, exhibited great taste in his
small garden at Rydal Mount. He said of himself--very truly though not
very modestly perhaps,--but modesty was never Wordsworth's
weakness--that nature seemed to have fitted him for three