In wine-making he was once
a very experimentalist, and studied every line of Macculloch and unripe
fruit; next, he turned over every inch of his garden, analyzed the soil
_a la_ Davy, and _salted_ all his growing crops. His cogitative habits led
him to take long walks in the country, and he soon flew from horticultural
chemistry to real farming; and about the same time took to road making and
macadamization, and became a surveyor of the highways. But the trustees
wanting to macadamize the miserably pitched street of the town, he
bethought him of dust in summer and mud in winter, and drew up a long
memorial to the lords of the soil, remonstrating with them on their
impolitic conduct; but all in vain. It is curious, however, to reflect
that what the people of a country town about ten years ago thought a curse
to their roads should now be adopted in many of the principal London
Streets. The last we heard of our bookseller's hobbies, was that he had
bought the lease of a house for the sake of the large garden attached to
it, and here, like Evelyn in his _Elysium Britannicum_, he passes his days
in the primitive occupation of gardening.
Our bookseller is a self-educated man, and in some pamphlets on the
charitable institution to which we have alluded, are many of the errors
of style peculiar to self-educated writers. Among his acquaintance we
remember an attorney who practised in London, but had a small house in
the town.
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