OF THE COUNTRY AND CLIMATE, AND OF MELBOURNE GARDENS
VICTORIA, and, indeed, Australia as a whole, has been spoken of as the
“Paradise of the working-man”—a paradise in which Melbourne, as the
busiest and richest city in the Commonwealth takes the foremost place,
this according to its people. The inhabitants of Sydney think
differently, so do those of Adelaide and Brisbane. Yet, on the whole, I
think Melbourne has the best reason for her proud boast. Wages may not
be higher than they are in Sydney, while they are certainly lower than
they are in Brisbane or the West; but the disadvantages are far less.
The heat is never really unendurable, while at the worst it is
stimulating, instead of enervating as in Sydney, only coming in bursts,
with constant cool intervals between in which to recoup. For two or
three days it may perhaps be over 100 in the shade, when the asphalt in
the street bubbles and the pavement feels red-hot beneath one’s feet; but
after about three days comes a change, and only once during eight whole
years have I known the thermometer remain for a whole week above 100° in
the shade. That was, if I remember rightly, in 1907, when whole families
turned out to sleep in the public parks and gardens. But usually at the
end of about the third day of heat there comes a terrific scorching north
wind, laden with thick yellow dust, a thousand times worse, if the
Australian would but believe it, than any London fog. It whirls in
through every crack of window or door, it fills eyes, and lungs, and
mouth, and nose till one feels on the verge of choking, and one’s skin is
so gritty that one could smooth a plank with it—a demon of a wind, making
every woman it encounters look a hag, and every man a fiend. If the
women of Melbourne would really put their brains to work in the matter of
complexions, instead of supporting a whole army of skin specialists and
spending incredible sums upon creams and washes, they would see to
it—holding a vote as they do—that every member of the municipal council
were hung, drawn, and quartered. Then they would pour all their messes
upon the streets instead of upon their faces, and go on appointing fresh
councillors and killing them off, till they lighted on even “one
righteous man” of sufficient intelligence to grapple with that
dust-fiend, which draws such heartrending lines round pretty eyes, and
plays such hopeless havoc with even the freshest and most youthful of
complexions.
I speak feelingly, because I love Melbourne; because I adore its sunshine
and the crisp, light air that might be so clear; because I hate to have
its most perfect days—days that in the country are a pure
delight—absolutely spoilt by what, one can but believe, is a remediable
evil.
But I have wandered away from the red-hot, north-wind days, which I
believe are thoroughly intractable—save, perhaps, under some immense
system of afforestation. The only possible good point about this north
wind is that when it gets to its very worst it usually changes. But oh!
with such a flame of fury! One can almost hear it stamp its foot as it
flings round. There is a whirl of skirts, an inarticulate shriek of
fury, and—bang goes the door of the north wind. The thermometer drops,
perhaps as low as to 70° within the hour, and one hurries home, folding
oneself upon oneself as well as possible—shivering and shaking in the
thin clothes, which had seemed of a blanket weight when they had been
donned that very morning—to spend the evening over a flaming wood-fire,
listening to the lovely drip-drip of rain upon the leaves, picturing how
the earth is palpitating into growth beneath its caress, hugging to
oneself the thought of the cool restful night, the glorious sleep, and
the enchanting air of spring that the whole world will wear on the
morrow, for the spring in Australia seems veritably to arise afresh after
every shower.
In Melbourne gardens there is no dead season. The borders and beds are
for ever full of surprises. It seems sometimes as if, for no particular
reason, the flowers have a fancy for coming out; and out they come. It
is a country where people please themselves. So, all the year round, one
may gather roses from some bush or other, a little hectic, perhaps, but
none the less beautiful for that; while the autumn and spring literally
run to meet one another in the gardens, overlapping winter in the most
cavalier fashion. I have seen willows along the Yarra bank all dark
tresses of drooping twig, and two days—only two days—later, thickly
veiled in a vivid green, not a hint of brown bark visible.
During the winter, which is marked more by an unpleasant damp and
chilliness than real cold, will come sudden, fervently warm days, which
bring all sorts of unlikely flowers into bloom, so that one sees Oriental
poppies flaunting among the primroses, and heliotrope, and carnations out
with the first daffodils, while it is seldom indeed that there is not
pink bloom on the ivy-leaf geraniums.
Some writers on Australia complain that because most of the completely
native trees do not shed their leaves, Australians do not know what a
true spring is like. Perhaps they are right in one way; the longer a man
has been starved the more completely will he appreciate a good meal when
he gets it; and there is no such length of colourless winter days to
struggle through in Australia—living only by this one hope, that the
spring must come at last, however tardily—as there is in England, and
therefore relief must be felt far less ardently. But against this let us
weigh the thousand and one subtle surprises of Nature in such a country.
Autumn, indeed, comes sobbing through the land, sweeping her heavy
rain-drenched garments over lawn and border, till the flowers drop to
earth, flattened, brown, and bedraggled; while “envious, sneaping” frosts
nip the dahlias, and flush the roses with hectic tints. It is nonsense
to say that the leaves do not fall, for they do, even from the native
trees, not in a mass, it is true, but even more sadly, one at a time, as
if the tree were with infinite reluctance slowly parting from each emblem
of her youth, the tattered bark hanging in ribbons round her, the sport
of every breeze; while everywhere in the cities and gardens there are
English trees of all sorts to be seen, with leaves that fall in a fashion
almost cheerful compared with the slow agony of their Australian
compeers.
Then suddenly the sun breaks through the clouds. Brilliant patches of
blue spread over the sky till they join in one unbroken sea of cobalt.
One forgets to put fresh logs on the fire, which the sun is laughing out
of countenance, flings open doors and windows, orders tea in the veranda,
and fares forth with little packets of seeds and bits of sticks, to grub
in the sweet teeming earth. What matter that in a couple more days
winter may be back again? Anyhow, it is only a matter of three months,
and that with innumerable such breaks.
The dahlias and the cosmos may have been all uprooted and the
chrysanthemums have blackened in the borders; but by that time the
narcissi are out, and the forget-me-not beds are alive with colour.
There are violas, too, and grape hyacinths, and what in England we call
“summer snowdrops,” and wallflowers, and periwinkles, while the japonica
is jewelled with bloom, and the lawns are a glory of green. If the
curtain of winter does slip down again, it does not matter much, for all
these are sturdy people, and not easily discouraged; while when it lifts
once more, the daffodils are ready to break into bloom, and the tulips
and irises; while the wattle is a veritable masque of spring in itself.
With such a climate it seems extraordinary that the private gardens in
Melbourne are not more of a success than they are. One reason, I
believe, is that the people are too busy to trouble, another that they
are too restless: they are always moving house—sometimes literally so,
for it is no uncommon thing to meet a fair-sized wooden edifice coming
along the road drawn upon wheels, by a long train of horses, and looking
like a gigantic snail. I really believe the idea of settling down in one
house for life would be—to use an Irishism—the death of any Australian.
The servants in Melbourne will inform you, almost at the moment they
enter your door, that they have “not come to stay”; and a man takes a new
house in much the same spirit. I believe it is all owing to the lack of
tradition. In England many of us have been born in the same house where
our progenitors have lived for centuries, and where, perhaps, the
descendants of our eldest brother may be expected to live for centuries
longer; while we ourselves fare out in the world with the hope of
founding some such enduring dwelling-place for ourselves, the need of a
permanent home being inherent in our blood.
But though the Australian’s great-grandfather may have lived in some such
fashion, it is more than probable that his actual grandfather lived in a
waggon or a tent, and that both he and his son were, from the exigencies
of the New Country, for ever moving on, seeking fresh pastures as the
country became more open and settlers began to thicken.
The discovery of gold alone was enough to instil this restless drop into
the blood of a people whose very presence in the country was indeed first
proof of such a tendency. In the wholesale rush which followed the first
discovery of gold in Bendigo and Ballarat, it must have seemed to
onlookers as if the merely agricultural and commercial Australia would
cease to exist. Vessels lay in the docks, rotting for the want of men to
repair them and hands to work them; for the sailors and the dock hands,
the Government clerks, the policemen, the shopkeepers and their
employees, even the very domestic servants, all joined in the stampede to
that delectable land, where a casual miner could earn from thirty to
forty pounds a day; while the Governor, like a modern Alexander Selkirk,
was left “monarch of all he surveyed,” with no one to dispute his rights,
certainly, but equally with no one to obey his orders. In the year
following the discoveries at Bendigo—1851—ten tons of gold were said to
have been taken from Victoria, gold then being worth £4 an ounce, while a
quarter of a million of presumably adventurous spirits landed in
Melbourne, all eagerly confident of making their fortunes. When this
lure was sufficient to induce people to risk the discomfort and peril of
the long voyage in a sailing-ship, and all the dangers of an unknown
land, it was not to be wondered at that the earlier settlers, who were
already on the spot, relinquished their ideas of a pastoral life in
favour of the enthralling possibilities of mining, and, forsaking their
farms, joined in the general rush to the gold countries.
You will say that all this has very little to do with Melbourne gardens.
But really it has a great deal to do with them, in that it has produced a
people with very little of the real home-making spirit; while if a man
will not trouble to make a home, it is certain sure that he will not
trouble to make a garden. There was one man in Melbourne—I except, of
course, the curator of the Botanical Gardens, whose work is too well
known to need any comment—who veritably created a garden out of a
rubbish-heap—a garden such as Australia needs, full of shade and
greenery, and massed flower and foliage that helped to conserve the
moisture of the ground. But there did not seem much money to be made out
of it, and so one of the endless succession of Ministers for
Agriculture—with that eternal craze to be up and doing which makes
Australian officialdom so galling to the real worker—decided to change
the garden into a dairy farm. It had not been in any way a useless
appendage, for it was a public place, and thronged with people on Sundays
and holidays; moreover, it had a horticultural school attached to it,
where boys and girls whose parents lived near, and who could not afford
to send their sons to some distant and costly agricultural college—for
their daughters no other possible training-ground existed—could be taught
fruit-growing and horticulture. At the time the place was started the
then Minister for Agriculture was interested in fruit-growing; and by
some good chance the next Minister happened to be the same, judging,
rightly enough, that it was likely to be one of the most profitable minor
industries of Victoria. But after them arose yet another Minister, whose
interests were all on the side of dairy-farming, and the garden—to many a
veritable oasis in the desert—was, as such, condemned. What has
ultimately happened I do not know, but I believe that one flower-bed,
some six half-starved cows, and as many boys, instructed after the
methods of Mr. Squeers, somehow fight it out together, though certainly
when I last saw it all the beauty and repose of the place had vanished
for ever. Yet this is but a single example of the restlessness with
which the country is infected, and the difficulty of producing and
maintaining anything really staple under such constantly-shifting
conditions.
The suburbs of Melbourne are beautifully wooded. If you climb to any
eminence of the city, such as the fire-station, and look down and around,
it seems as if it were indeed built in a veritable forest of trees, while
you imagine the most beautiful gardens luxuriating beneath their shade.
But, on the whole, you are doomed to disappointment.
The owners or tenants of the small villas seem to do the best with the
scrap of ground that is at their disposal. But the cottagers make little
or no effort to beautify their houses even when they are their own
possessions; while the gardens of the wealthy people—say at Toorak, which
is supposedly the most select suburb—are certainly very disappointing.
One sees hideous corrugated iron fences round really fine houses, with
gardens out of all proportion to their size; Gothic mansions, in a
setting worthy only of a little villa at twenty pounds a year, looking
like nothing so much as a very big joint on a very small dish; gardens
where there is no shade nor retirement possible, and with the aggressive
fence visible from every point; while the parsimony in the matter of
water is almost beyond belief, fine shrubs that may have cost pounds,
rare plants, and well-laid lawns, all being reduced to a khaki-coloured
waste for the want of a few pounds spent in watering them. Really, I
believe that if the gardens had to be watered with champagne the wealthy
Melbournian would not hesitate; it is spending his money on mere water
which he dislikes: that is the clouds’ job, and not his, and he spends
his life waiting for them to do their duty, though he ought to know them
better by now.
All over the country it is the same, in the great as well as the small.
People seem to resent money being spent on any form of irrigation. They
will plough and sow, they will reap when the crop is ready, and in any
well-conducted climate that ought to be enough. But the Australian
climate, like all beauties, has its very distinct failings, and in the
matter of rain it is, to say the least of it, capricious. In most
countries a caprice such as this, when once fully known, is provided
against. In time, perhaps, the Australians also will grow to realize
their country’s shortcoming, and a vast system of irrigation be carried
out that will make a veritable Paradise of Victoria; but until that is
accomplished, one can only say that its agricultural qualities are, like
the curate’s egg, “good in parts.”
Still, something has been done, though any movement to further irrigation
has received very lukewarm support from the public.
As early as 1884 an artesian well was formed at Sale, which for a number
of years gave out 100,000 gallons a day. When that failed—whether from
the choking of sand or from corrosion of the casing I do not know—a new
bore was put down; but, as the water was impure, containing too much
sulphuretted hydrogen, a third had to be sunk, which now yields as much
as 145,000 gallons of water a day.
In 1906 eight bores were put down on one estate. Overnewton,
Maribyrnong, all of which yielded good supplies of water for stock
purposes, though from only one was water obtained fit for drinking; while
quite recently a number of bores have been sunk on the Mallee, that
drought-tortured district, where the almost ironical existence of a large
underground lake has lately been discovered, the bore in one place
striking water at 190 feet below the surface.
[Picture: Excavating an Irrigation Channel]
Under the direct control of the “State Rivers and Water-Supply
Commission,” which came into force in 1906, are the Goulburn River Works,
which include the Waranga Basin, with a storage capacity of 9,500,000,000
cubic feet; the Loddon River Works, with storage capacity of 610,000,000
cubic feet; and the Kow Swamp Works, with its capacity of 1,780,000,000
cubic feet. Then there are the Broken River Works, the Kerang North-West
Lakes Works, the Lake Lonsdale Reservoir, the Lower Wimmera Works, and
the Long Lake Pumping Works, the two irrigation areas of Nyah and White
Cliffs, and some thirty distributory works; also the Mildura Irrigation
Trust and the Geelong Water Supply, these last being governed
independently of the Commission.
Now there is a plan mooted for damming up the Upper Goulburn River with a
gigantic weir, that would have to be about 1,700 feet long, and, at the
deepest part of the river, 140 feet high, by which it is estimated that a
reservoir with a capacity of 60,000,000,000 cubic feet would be obtained,
and 20,000 acres of gullies and river flats permanently submerged, making
it the largest reservoir in existence.
Of course, this latter scheme is only _sur le tapis_, remaining, indeed,
to quote the Australian Official Year-Book’s tactful statement, “in
abeyance.” But still things are, as the American would express it,
“beginning to hum” in the irrigation line, and when once the people grasp
its enormous significance, it is impossible to believe that they will not
only insist on more irrigation schemes being inaugurated, but also see to
it that they are not allowed to remain “in abeyance.” Meanwhile,
imposing as some of the figures may seem, when one thinks of the size of
Victoria, even if all these already completed schemes were successful,
they could but appear almost as inadequate for the necessary supply of
water as was Mrs. Partington’s mop for its dispersal.
But, alas! even the schemes which have been carried through have not
proved altogether successful. With her usual courage and tendency to
rush her fences, Victoria embarked quite blithely in the first place on
the Mildura scheme, which has at last struggled to success through a
series of depressing failures, while the history of the other schemes has
been far from cheering. The fact was, nobody knew anything about
irrigation, or thought for a moment that there was anything to learn. In
many places huge lengths of channelling were badly constructed, badly
laid, and so badly placed that the land which would have profited most by
the water was left completely dry, while the distribution was so wide
that a very great deal was lost in the long channels. As a matter of
fact, I believe that the estates in Australia are too large and the
population too small to admit at present of a very great deal of
effective irrigation, much as it is needed. For a good many years I
lived on a sugar estate in Mauritius, which depended completely on
irrigation. But, though one of the biggest estates in the island, it
would have been altogether lost in any corner of an Australian station;
while it was continually thronged with workers, always ready to correct
any defective flow or clear out any blocked channel. As Victoria
increases her country population, so also will she increase her chances
of success in irrigation, for I feel it is only on small, densely
cultivated farms that it can have a proper chance of paying for its
working expenses. As it is, an extract which I must quote from a
Ministerial statement, made not so very long ago, is anything but
encouraging:
“The State has already spent £1,450,000 on irrigation works. Interest on
this at 4 per cent. amounts to £98,000 annually; maintenance, about
£47,000; receipts from rates and sales of water average about £35,000.
The State irrigation channels command 1,104,000 acres of land, of which
218,000 acres were irrigated last year; but the crop return was trivial
(over half the irrigated area was native grass), when compared with the
results obtained from similar irrigated areas in other countries having
no greater natural advantages.”
The great fault of the system seems to have been that, instead of paying
a certain percentage on the value of their estates regularly, be the
season wet or dry, just as a man will pay a life or fire insurance, the
landowners have been allowed to pay only for the water they use. In this
the holders of the largest areas were the most culpable. Their estates
were extensive enough for them to be independent of very heavy crops,
while the smaller men, to whom close cultivation was a necessity, and who
used water—and therefore paid for it—at all seasons were in time of
drought deprived of what they needed by the sudden demand made on the
supply by the large holders; therefore it is not to be wondered at that
the system resulted in what the _Melbourne Age_ has described as a
“colossal failure.”
At last, however, a new policy has been instigated. In the future the
distribution of water is to be controlled by State experts only,
landowners who are within the irrigation area having to pay for it
whether they use it or not, so that when holdings become smaller and
settlers more plentiful there is every hope that the desert may indeed
“blossom like a rose.” Æsculapius, in his “Birds,” tells us that it is
from our enemies, not from our friends, that we must learn; and it is
equally so with our failures. Australia has had a good many nasty jars,
mostly caused by that impetuosity that is part of her political youth;
but nobody can say that she does not profit by her mistakes, that she
immortalizes them as some older countries do, or that she is willing for
a moment to remain beaten.
Meanwhile, from the farmer’s point of view, comes the complaint that
irrigation costs more than it is worth, and that he cannot get sufficient
labourers to work irrigated land. But, with all due respect to the
Australian farmer, this is mainly a case of having taken up more land
than he can cultivate. He idealizes size. He would rather have a
thousand acres of drought-stricken and useless land than he would have a
hundred densely cultivated, and paying hand-over-hand. He himself will
work incredibly hard in bursts, while his wife and children toil like
slaves, but he does not care to face the constant, steady round demanded
by what he would scornfully describe as a “pocket-handkerchief lot.”
The scarcity of labourers is indeed a difficulty, and it will remain a
difficulty till the farmers provide more adequately for the comfort of
their hands. The married man is altogether at a discount on the
Australian station and farm. In the former the men, all more or less
casual employees, live together in a large hut, served by a special cook;
in the latter they live with their employer. Any accommodation for wife
or family is very rare indeed, so that a married man who secures work in
the country must, for the most part, maintain his belongings separately
in lodgings in town. One hears a very great deal of virtuous indignation
expressed in regard to the overcrowding of the towns, and the fact that
men who are out of work there will not take billets as farm labourers.
Also, on the other hand, that men do not marry as they should, that the
legitimate birth-rate is so low and the percentage of illegitimate
children so high. But if a man is normal and honest-minded, with a
liking for clean living, he needs a wife and children and a home of his
own. As a single man, wandering from station to station for shearing and
harvesting, he has, on the whole, a very good time, plenty of company,
plenty of money to spend, and no responsibilities. But the better sort
of men do not fear responsibilities, and they want something more than a
good time; so that, after a few years, they get sick of the wandering
life and wish to settle down. In the country, however much they might
desire it, there is, indeed, very little chance of this for farm
labourers when once they are married.
They may, perhaps, have saved enough to start a tiny farm of their own,
but it means ceaseless drudgery, and only too often a life of complete
isolation both for husbands and wives, while the masters, whom they would
be only too willing to continue to serve, have no place for them.
There is a great deal good in Australia that is not at all good in
England, particularly in the life of the working-man; but I have found no
parallel to the comfortable two-storied cottages, surrounded by good
gardens, which one sees gathered round English farm-houses. When
cottages such as these are built; when a labourer can settle down for
life on one farm, and grow his own vegetables, keep poultry, and purchase
a cow; and can see his own family growing up healthily and happily around
him, then I believe that Victoria and her sister States will have no need
to complain of her working-people all flocking to the big towns; while a
new generation of agricultural labourers, bred and born to country life,
will thus be insured, the number of illegitimate children be lessened,
and emigration bear a more tempting face to the English labourer than it
has done heretofore—so far, at least, as Australia is concerned.
This short-sighted policy of the banning and barring of the married man
is evident in many other branches of Australian industry besides that of
agriculture; and only the other day I cut the following out of the
_Sydney Bulletin_, which has a happy knack of putting its finger directly
on the weak places in the administration of its country:
“The old, old policy of baby-prohibition, this time from the Victorian
Police Department:—‘Wardsman wanted at Police Hospital, Victoria
Barracks, St. Kilda Road. Salary, £75 per year, with board. Applicants
must be single, etc.’ It is a wonder the unfortunate baby ever contrives
to get born at all, when one considers the number of awful bosses who
fine the father in his whole salary if baby happens.”
All this time I seem to have got very far away from my first subject of
gardens, but it has been merely from a natural discursiveness of mind,
and not from any lack of legitimate material, for, indeed, the paucity of
interest to be found in the private gardens of Melbourne is amply
balanced by the beauty and variety of the public ones; among which the
Botanical Gardens must be accorded the first place, both in importance
and size—covering, as they do, eighty-three acres—exquisitely situated,
for the most part on either side of a deep valley, along the hollow of
which runs a thick grove of moisture-loving palms.
To the right of this, as one looks towards the city, is the Alexandria
Avenue and the winding, silver ribbon of the Yarra, which is gradually
being made as beautiful at close quarters as it now appears from the
all-enhancing distance. Besides this deep valley, one elevation of which
is topped by Government House, there is an infinitude of ups and downs,
sweep after sweep of undulating greensward broken by many flower-beds and
by jutting masses of trees, fringed with blossoms of every colour. It
seems that anything will grow in Melbourne if only you water it
enough—the old, old grievance again—and both subtropical plants and the
hardiest English varieties flourish amicably side by side in the
Botanical Gardens. Still, it is in the diversity of its trees rather
than its plants that it really gains most over an English garden of the
same sort, the shapes and colouring of the trunks, the almost human turn
of the branches, the size and luxuriance of the leaves, proving an
endless source of delight.
Best of all I love the gardens in the autumn, when all the borders are
gleaming with the pale masses of chrysanthemums, bed after bed, border
after border of them, tawny yellow and pale gold, white and amethyst, not
one single glaring or sharply-defined tint, the very soul of colour. The
autumn in the Melbourne Botanical Gardens is exquisite. The little,
sharp chill in the morning air, the noon of clear warm sunshine; and the
mist-haunted evenings, when standing on the high ground, one watches the
trees grow ghostlike and unreal in the fading light, while the lamps of
the distant town glimmer out beyond the grey veil of the river. Autumn
evenings in England smell very good, but not as good as autumn evenings
in an Australian garden, where the sun has been shining warmly through
the day, drawing all the perfume from the blossoms, the fallen leaves,
and humid earth. Then, there is not the same sense of sadness, of loss,
which is inseparable from the autumn at home; for here it is not the end,
but rather the beginning, the time when the burden and heat of the long
summer is past, while life is all ready to start afresh during the damp
coolness of the winter days; for, however cold it may be, it is always a
cold that quickens, and does not deaden as does that of northern
climates.
Besides the Botanical Gardens, ‘Melbourne boasts, among others, the
Exhibition Gardens, famous for their roses, and the Treasury Gardens,
windswept, and dirty, and desolate, their ragged garments incongruously
patched by a Japanese garden, railed all round with spiked iron rails,
into which no one but the gardener can ever penetrate, though city
urchins sit on a mangy bank near and toss stones into it. Just beyond
these gardens, separated from them, indeed, only by a road, lie the
Fitzroy Gardens, which come first and foremost in the affections of many
people. They have not the grandeur of the Botanical Gardens, though they
display an even more perennial greenness and a certain wild charm of
their own, and the lawns are not so smoothly kept, while in places the
grass grows deliciously lush and high. There are more English trees
there, too, and in the autumn the ground is all golden with fallen
leaves, while there are fewer precisely-set flower-beds and more
borders—a far more artistic arrangement, to my mind.
They are, indeed, lovely gardens—gardens where old Andrew Marvell might
well have brought to life his all exquisite conception of “A green
thought in a green shade,” if—and, alas! that there should be such an
“if”—if only it had not been that—by some impish freak of, God knows
what, Mayor, Corporation, or City Council—these sylvan lawns and glades
are decorated, the horrible word stands well here, with a redundancy of
statues, beside which some of Madame Tussaud’s figures might well be
considered as works of art. I have often wondered that the puritanical
City fathers have not raised objections to these figures on account of
their classic want of drapery—the only classical thing about them—but
perhaps it has been realized that they are too utterly hideous to arouse
any feeling but aversion, even in the most ardent and youthful breast.
However it may be, there they remain, and are likely to remain, till that
golden age when education has been digested into something at least
resembling cultivation.