20 THE MONTHLY
to be matched in the whole country. I accepted the offer, and immediately found that they had been talking in terms of gardening, and that the kings and generals they had mentioned were only so many tulips, to which the gardeners, according to their usual custom, had given such high titles and appellations of honour. I was very much pleased and astonished at the glorious show of these gay vegetables, that arose in great profusion on all the banks about us; but my agreeable sensations were a little abated by observing the company of ten seemed to laugh at me. I accidentally praised a tulip as one of the finest I ever saw, upon which they told me it was a common Fool's Coat. Upon that I praised a second, which it seems was but another kind of Fool's Coat. I had the same fate with two or three more; for which reason I desired the owner of the garden to let me know which was the finest of the flowers, for that I was so unskilful in the art, that I thought the most beautiful were the most valuable, and that those which had the gayest colours were the most beautiful. He told me, that he valued the bed of flowers, which lay before us, and was not above twenty yards in length and two in breadth, more than he would the best hundred acres of land in England; and added, that it would have been worth twice the money it is, if a foolish cookmaid of his had not almost ruined him the last winter, by mistaking a handful of tulip roots for a heap of onions, and by that means, says he, made me a dish of porridge, that cost me above a thousand pounds sterling. He then shewed me what he
