In Farnham Castle, the hall is a large room, the general proportions of which are not bad; but in point of architecture it has no pretensions whatever. There is not even a cornice under the ceiling; and it is lighted by two tiers of windows, a mode of lighting which always suggests to our mind the idea of commonplace composition on the part of the architect. It is seldom, indeed, that the architect has an opportunity of deviating from the usual proportions of windows, and, consequently, from the practice of placing one tier of them over another; and, therefore, when a church, or a large hall like that at Farnham Castle, comes under his pencil, he ought to seize the opportunity of deviating from common practices, and producing something like an external feature which would indicate what was within. This subject never occurs to us without bringing before our mind's eye the Bank of England and the National Gallery at Charing Cross, with their blank windows, introduced, as it were, to imbue these large buildings with a commonplace expression. That the public should bear with the latter building is a proof of the low state of taste for the fine arts among the general mass of society in this country. At the sale of the books and drawings of the late Mr. Nash, there was a design for a National Gallery that we have seen elsewhere, except in Mr. Donald's arboretum. It is a light, graceful, rapidly growing tree, with wide-spreading branches, which droop to the ground. We consider it as nothing more than a variety of the species, whatever be its name, to which Q. rubra, coccinea, tinctoria, macrocarpa, and half a dozen other specific names in our nurseries, belong. We are perfectly satisfied that, from a bushel of American acorns taken from one tree, all these sorts, and many others, might be obtained. We are happy to find that Messrs. Young and Penny have begun an arboretum, distinct from that at Milford House, in their own nursery; and, as they have abundance of room (above 150 acres), we have no doubt they will form a very complete one. Among the herbaceous plants, we observed that the statices were least affected by the drought. Many of the new sorts are very beautiful, and deserve to be in every good flower-garden. Among the nursery practices which were new to us here, is that of buying in seedling birch trees which have been pulled up out of the copses. These are found to root much better than seedlings of the same age and size taken out of a regular seedbed; doubtless because, in the latter case, a greater proportion of the taproot requires to be cut off. In the case of the young birches pulled out of the copses, the taproot, which could not get far down into the hard soil, has its substance in a more concentrated form, and is more branchy; hence little requires to be cut off it, except the ragged fibres; and it may be considered as acting as a bulb to the upper part of the plant. The tops of the seedling birches are shortened before planting; and the plants, Mr. Young informs us, make as much wood in one year, as regular nursery-reared birch seedlings will in two. It is found, in this part of the country, that the downy-leaved black-barked seedling birches stole much freer when cut down as coppice wood, than the smooth-leaved white-barked weeping variety. The plum-leaved willow is here grown to a great extent for planting in copses, as also are the common ash and the sweet chestnut.
