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Updated: June 22, 2025
The Waterlow Park is a pleasant place, full of children and aged persons in perambulators during the middle hours of the day, and in the summer evening time a haunt of young lovers; but your early wanderer finds it solitary save for Vertumnus, who, with L.C.C. on the front of him, is putting in crocuses.
On one end he designed an allegory of Vertumnus, with his husbandmen around him busy with their labours, and on the other Pomona, Diana, &c. Perhaps in these last he has carried his imitation of Andrea del Sarto rather too far in the matter of draperies, which are too profuse and studied.
Here the conversation was interrupted by the entrance of one of Lady Anne's little boys, who came running eagerly up to his mother, to ask whether he might have "the sulphurs to show to Helena Delacour. I want to show her Vertumnus and Pomona, mamma," said he. "Were not the cherries that the old gardener sent very good?"
Hebe poured out the wines, Vertumnus and Pomona handed round apples and grapes, Thetis and her sea-nymphs brought every variety of fish, and shepherds crowned with chaplets of ivy arrived from the hills of Arcady, bearing jars of milk and honey to the festive board. At Milan fresh wonders were awaiting the bridal pair.
In the kitchen the godless cook had spoiled the temper of several swords by sticking them into the oven instead of spits; with a Turkish horsetail, captured at Vienna, she dusted her handmill. In a word, housewifely Ceres had banished Mars and ruled along with Pomona, Flora, and Vertumnus over Dobrzynski’s house, stable, and barn. But to-day the goddesses must yield anew; Mars returns.
Thus, having to execute a Vertumnus with his husbandmen, he painted a peasant seated with a vine-pruner in his hand, which is so beautiful and so well done that it is a very rare thing, even as certain children that are there are lifelike and natural beyond all belief. On the other side he painted Pomona and Diana, with other Goddesses, enveloping them perhaps too abundantly with draperies.
In vain he endeavors to retain his book, desirous of getting abroad; tells it what trouble it is to undergo, and imparts some things to be said of him to posterity. You seem, my book, to look wistfully at Janus and Vertumnus; to the end that you may be set out for sale, neatly polished by the pumice-stone of the Sosii.
To this I replied, smiling, "I am neither a player nor a vertumnus; but I am alternate, at one time in your light, and at another in your shade; thus both a foreigner and a native." Hereupon the chief teacher looked at me, and said, "You speak things strange and wonderful: tell me who you are."
And is there any form of piled-up wealth, bins of specie at the bank, or mountains of precious stones, rubies and sapphires and carbuncles, as we picture them in the subterranean treasuries of kings, that thrills the imagination with so dream-like a sense of uncounted riches, untold gold, as such natural bullion of the earth; pyramids of apples lighting up dark orchards, great plums lying in heaps of careless purple, corridors hung with fabulous bunches of grapes, or billowy mounds of yellow grain the treasuries of Pomona and Vertumnus?
As a gardener, I shall probably have as much joy, though not quite so much profit, by thirty or forty shillings; for there is the greatest promise of fruit this year at 'Blackheath, that ever I saw in my life. Vertumnus and Pomona have been very propitious to me: as for Priapus, that tremendous garden god, as I no longer invoke him, I cannot expect his protection from the birds and the thieves.
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