Hippolyte Adolphe Taine

Notes on England

Translated by W.F. Rae. Strahan & Co., 1872.

Regent's Park is larger than the Jardin des Plantes and the Luxembourg put together. I have often remarked that our life seems to them cooped up, confined; they need air and space more than we do...This park is in a retired neighbourhood; one hears no longer the rolling of carriages, and one forgets London; it is a solitude. The sun shines, but the air is always charged with damp clouds, floating watering-pots which dissolve in rain every quarter of an hour. The vast watery meadows have a charming softness, and the green branches drip with monotonous sound upon the still water of the pond

The French critic and historian had published a History of English Literature some years earlier, and seems to have been convinced that it rains all the time in England. However his dampened spirits became dangerously excited on discovering the Botanical Gardens.

I enter a hot-house where there are splendid orchids, some having the rich velvet of the iris, others a fresh colour of that inexpressible, delicious, mingled tint transformed with light like palpitating living flesh, a woman's breast; alongside, palm-trees raise their stems in a tepid atmosphere.

Recovering from this erotic fantasy, he adds:

A strange thing to us is that there are no keepers; admission is free, and no damage is done; I can understand that they must ridicule our establishments and public festivals, with their accompaniments of municipal guards