g the sedgy banks of the river, and the
red blaze of high-piled fagots was streaming from the houses across
the black, cold, turbid waters.'

If our author's picture of the vine is not _couleur de rose_, he is
still less complimentary to the olive. Languedoc is the country of the
latter luxury; and Languedoc is in the south of France--aptly termed
'the austere south.' 'It _is_ austere, grim, sombre. It never smiles:
it is scathed and parched. There is no freshness or rurality in it. It
does not seem the country, but a vast yard--shadeless, glaring, drear,
and dry. Let us glance from our elevated perch over the district we
are traversing. A vast, rolling wilderness of clodded earth, browned
and baked by the sun; here and there masses of red rock heaving
themselves above the soil like protruding ribs of the earth, and a
vast coating of drowthy dust, lying like snow upon the ground. To the
left, a long ridge of iron-like mountains--on all sides rolling hills,
stern and kneaded, looking as though frozen. On the slopes and in the
plains, endless rows of scrubby, ugly trees, powdered with the
universal dust, and looking exactly like mop-sticks. Sprawling and
straggling over the soil beneath them, jungles of burnt-up, leafless
bushes, tangled, and apparently neglected. The trees are olives and
mulberries--the bushes, vines.' This is a picture that will not
impress an Englishman with the due sensation of dreariness, unless he
recollects that in France there are no enclosures--that the country
lies spread out before him, in some parts and seasons, like a richly
variegated carpet; in others, like an Arabian desert. The romantic,
Eastern, Biblical olive!--what is it? 'The trunk, a weazened,
sapless-looking piece of timber, the branches spreading out from it
like the top of a mushroom; and the colour, when you can see it for
dust, a cold, sombre, grayish green. One olive is as like another as
one mop-stick is like another. The tree has no picturesqueness, no
variety. It is not high enough to be grand, and not irregular enough
to be graceful. Put it beside the birch, the beech, the elm, or the
oak, and you will see the poetry of the forest, and its poorest and
most meagre prose.'

The mop-stick appearance of the olive is an artificial beauty; to make
it look like an umbrella is the _ne plus ultra_ of arboriculture. But
the present race of olives, twist and torment them as we will, are
inferior to those of the times of our grandfat