For flowers as flowers they seem to me to care little or nothing.

Their cottages have no pretty confusion of blossoms as in our villages.

You never see the cottager at work among his roses; once his necessary labours are over, he smokes and talks to his neighbours: to grow flowers for aesthetic reasons were too ornamental, too unproductive a hobby.

AEsthetically the Dutch are dead, or are alive only in the matter of green paint, which they use with such charming effect on their houses, their mills and their boats.

What is pretty is old--as indeed is the case in our own country, if we except gardens.