chap. cm.

muca'ce*. .S'aT.IX.

1509

gardens and villas of Canton, and other places in China. Fig. 1302., whichis reduced from a drawing kindly lent us by Sir G. T. Staunton, showspart of the villa of Consequa, who had one of the finest gardens in Cantonabout the year 1812, when the drawing was taken. A large weeping willowis shown in the left of the picture, two or more in the middle, and one onthe right, as if placed on a balcony; or perhaps growing through it fromthe conservatory below. The Chinese employ the weeping willow also intheir cemeteries, as appears from fig. 1304., reduced from a plate in Dobell’sTravels, which represents the cemetery of the Vale of Tombs, near the lakeSee Hoo. All the prints of Chinese objects, indeed, concur in showing thatthe weeping willow is one of the most generally admired trees in China. It iscommon in gardens in the neighbourhood of Algiers, and in burial-groundsthroughout Turkey, and great part of the west of Asia. In many countries,particularly in France and Germany, it appears to have taken the place of thecypress, as a tree for planting in cemeteries; and the reasons why it is pre-ferred for this purpose are thus given by Poiret in the Nouveau Du Hamel: —“ The cypress was long considered as the appropriate ornament of the ceme-tery ; but its gloomy shade among the tombs, and its thick heavy foliageof the darkest green, inspire only depressing thoughts, and present deathunder its most appalling image. The weeping willow, on the contrary,rather conveys a picture of the grief felt for the loss of the departed, thanof the darkness of the grave. Its light and elegant foliage flows like thedishevelled hair and graceful drapery of a sculptured mourner over a sepul-chral urn ; and conveys those soothing, though softly melancholy, reflections,which have made one of our poets exclaim, ‘ There is a pleasure even in grief.’”Notwithstanding the preference thus given to the willow, the shape of thecypress, conveying, to a fanciful mind, the idea of a flame pointing upwards,has been supposed to afford an emblem of the hope of immortality, and isstill planted in many churchyards on the Continent, and alluded to inepitaphs under this light. In many of the churchyards of Germany, bothemblems are combined; the Lombardy poplar being substituted for thecypress; as, indeed, we are informed it is in many of the cemeteries inTurkey and Persia. Fig. 1303. represents a churchyard in Baden, called the

1303

V,

IWISHHIHi'lil.i

i;irn ill

Oehlberg (Mount of Olives), where the two trees are both planted, so asto produce a very pleasing effect.

Much has, of late years, been said respecting a weeping willow in theIsland of St. Helena, supposed to overhang the tomb of Napoleon. Accord-

5 f 4