After several parallels between great men, which appeared to me altogether groundless and chimerical, I was surprised to hear one say, that he valued the Black Prince more than the Duke of Venoms. How the Duke of Vendosme should become a rival of Black Prince, I couldn’t conceive; and was more startled when I heard a second affirm, with great vehemence, that if the Emperor of Germany was not going off, he should like him better than either of them. He added, that though the season was so changeable, the Duke of Marlborough was in blooming beauty. I was wondering to myself from whence they had received this odd intelligence: especially when I heard them mention the names of several other great generals, as the Prince of Hess and the King of Sweden, who, they said, were both running away. To which they added, what I entirely agreed with them in, that the Crown of France was very weak, but that the Marshal Villars still kept his colors. At last, one of them told the company, if they would go along with him, he would show them a chimney-sweeper and a painted lady in the same bed, which he was sure would very much please them. The shower which had driven them as well as myself into the house, was now over; and as they were passing by me into the garden, I asked them to let me be one of their company.
The gentleman of the house told me, if I delighted in flowers, it would be worth my while; for that he believed he could show me such a blow of tulips as was not to be matched in the whole country.
I accepted the offer, and immediately found that they had been talking in terms of gardening, and that the kings and generals they had mentioned were only so many tulips, to which the gardeners, according to their usual custom, had given such high titles and appellations of honor.
I was very much pleased and astonished at the glorious show of these gay vegetables, that arose in great profusion on all the banks about us. Sometimes I considered every leaf as an elaborate piece of tissue, in which the threads and fibers were woven together into different configurations, which gave a different coloring to the light as it glanced on the several parts of the surface. Sometimes I considered the whole bed of tulips, according to the notion of the greatest mathematician and philosopher that ever lived, as a multitude of optic instruments, designed for the separating light into all those various colors of which it is composed.
I was awakened out these my philosophical speculations, by observing the company often seemed to laugh at me. I accidentally praised a tulip as one of the finest ever saw; upon which they told me, it was a common Fool" s Coat. Upon that I praised another, which it seems was but another kind of Fool" s Coat.
I had the same fate with two or three more, for which reason I desired the owner of the garden to let me know which were the finest of the flower; for that I was so unskillful in the art, that I thought the most beautiful were the most valuable, and that those which had the gayest colours were the most beautiful. The gentleman smiled at my ignorance. He seemed a very plain honest man, and a person of good sense, had not his head been touched with that distemper which Hippocrates calls the Tulippomania; in so much that he would talk very rationally on any subject in the world but a tulip.
He told me, that he valued the bed of flowers which lay before us, and was not above twenty yards in length and two in breadth, more than he would the best hundred acres of land in England, and added, that it would have been worth twice the money it is, if a foolish cook, maid of his had not almost ruined him in the last winter, by mistaking a handful of tulip roots for a heap of onions, and “by that means,” says he, “made me a dish of pottage that cost me above thousand pounds sterling.” He then showed me what he thought the finest of his tulips, which I found received all their value from their rarity, and oddness, and put me in mind of our great fortunes, which are not always the greatest beauties.