Peter Collinson—Memorials of John Bartram and Humphrey Marshall [pp. 416-450]

Peter Collinson.
It is an interesting fact, that it should have been reserved for
our own time and for our own country, to bring to light far
more than was before known of the life, history, and scientific
habits and correspondence of that eminent and excellent man,
who was a London merchant, and who died about the middle of
the last century. True, the English themselves acknowledge,
that it was an American who first told them what they
wanted to know about Sebastian Cabot. The Edinburg Reviewers, even before that, had found out that "they should soon
learn to love the Americans if they sent them many more
such books," as one which Robert Walsh had written about
France.
The recent work by Dr. Darlington, a Pennsylvanian, has
awakened deep interest in England, with regard to one of their
own sons collaterally introduced, and is equally well spoken of
on both sides the water. It is entitled, " Memorials of John
Bartram and Humphry Marshall;" but nearly one half of its
five hundred and ninety-five pages of fair, large, open type, is
occupied with the letters of Peter Collinson. No Philadelphian
can read it without feeling that the next statue erected in the
city of brotherly love after those of Penn and Franklin, and
that contemplated in honour of Washington, should be one to
perpetuate the memory of what she owes to Peter Collinson.
Whoever reads it will find interesting matters of colonial
history; minute particulars illustrating the character of the
intercourse between this country and the old for fifty years
before the Revolution, which he sees no where else.
But to return to Peter Collinson-since sounding his praises
so loud, we must be permitted to call up Southey to our support. He thus sums up in few words, what was known and
thought of this London friend of our own Logan, Franklin and
Bartram, in his time:
"Peter Collinson, whose pious memory ought to be a standing toast at the meetings of the Horticultural Society, used to
say that he never knew an instance in which the pursuit of such
pleasure as the culture of a garden affords, did not find men
temperate and virtuous, or make them so. And this may be
affirmed as an undeniable and not unimportant fact relating to
the lower classes of society, that whenever the garden of a cot "".
[JULY
420