hedges we cannot determine.* A square and a round labyrinth were so capital ingredients of a garden formerly, that in Du Cerceau's architecture, who lived in the time of Charles IX. and Henry III. there is scarce a ground-plot without one of each. The enchantment of antique appellations has consecrated a pleasing idea of a royal residence, of which we now regret the extinction. Havering in the Bower, the jointure of many dowager queens, conveys to us the notion of a romantic scene. In Kip's views of the seats of our nobility and gentry, we see the same tiresome and returning uniformity. Every house is approached by two or three gardens, consisting perhaps of a gravelwalk and two grass plats, or borders of flowers. Each rises above the other by two or three steps, and as many walls and terrasses; and so many iron-gates, that we recollect those ancient romances, in which every entrance was guarded by nymphs or dragons. At Lady Orford's at Piddletown in Dorsetshire, there was, when my brother married, a double inclosure of thirteen gardens, * Drayton in a note to his Epistle of Rosamond, says, her labyrinth was built of vaults under ground, arched and walled with brick and stone-but, as Mr. Gough observes, he gives no authority for that assertion, v. pref. to 2d. edit of British Topography, p. xxx. Such vaults might remain to Drayton's time, but did not prove that there had been no superstructure. † [See Theatre de la Grande Brétagne and Atkyns' Gloucestershire, by T. Kip.] each I suppose not much above an hundred yards square, with an enfilade of correspondent gates; and before you arrived at these, you passed a narrow gut between two stone terrasses, that rose above your head, and which were crowned by a line of pyramidal yews. A bowling-green was all the lawn admitted in those times, a circular lake the extent of magnificence. Yet though these and such preposterous inconveniencies prevailed from age to age, good sense in this country had perceived the want of something at once more grand and more natural. These reflections and the bounds set to the waste made by royal spoilers, gave origine to parks. They were contracted forests, and extended gardens. Hentzner* says, that according to Rous of Warwick the first park was that at Woodstock. If so, it might be the foundation of a legend that Henry II. secured his mistress in a labyrinth: it was no doubt more difficult to find her in a park than in a palace, when the intricacy of the woods and various lodges buried in covert might conceal her actual habitation. It is more extraordinary that having so long ago stumbled on the principle of modern gardening, we should have persisted in retaining its reverse, symmetrical and unnatural gardens. That parks were rare in other countries, Hentzner, who travelled over great part of Europe, leads us to [Translated by Mr. W. and published in 1757, "A Journey into England by Paul Hentzner, in 1598.] suppose, by observing that they were common in England. In France they retain the name, but nothing is more different both in compass and disposition. Their parks are usually square or oblong inclosures, regularly planted with walks of chesnuts or limes, and generally every large town has one for its public recreation. They are exactly like Burton's court at Chelsea-college, and rarely larger.* One man, one great man we had, on whom nor education nor custom could impose their prejudices; who, on evil days though fallen, and with darkness and solitude compassed round, judged that the mistaken and fantastic ornaments he had seen in gardens, were unworthy of the almighty hand that planted the delights of Paradise. He seems with the prophetic eye of taste [as I have [One of the earliest authors, who have noticed the art of gardening as practised in their own time, is Sir Henry Wotton, in his "Treatise on the Elements of Architecture." " First, (he says) I must notice a certain contrariety between building and gardening for as fabricks should be regular, so gardens should be irregular, or at least cast into a very wilde regularity. To exemplify my conceit, I have seen a garden for the manner perchance incomparable, a delicate and diligent curiosity, surely without parallel among foreign nasions, namely, in the garden of Sir Henry Fanshawe, at his seat at Ware Park." Remaines, P. 64, 3d. Edit. 1674. This method of contrasting the hues of flowers, and flowering shrubs, was afterwards adopted by Kent, as his own invention.] † [When Milton, in his earlier poems, describes a garden, he pourtrays what he actually saw-when he wrote his Paradise Lost he could not see; and he trusted to and followed the force of his own imagination, and memory of the classics heard taste well defined*] to have conceived, to have foreseen modern gardening; as Lord Bacon announced the discoveries since made by experimental philosophy. The description of Eden is a warmer and more just picture of the present style than Claud Lorrain could have painted from Hagley or Stourhead. The first lines I shall quote exhibit Stourhead on a more magnificent scale. Thro' Eden went a river large, Nor chang'd his course, but thro' the shaggy hill, Par. Lost, B. 4, L. 222. Hagley seems pictured in what follows, which thro' veins Of porous earth with kindly thirst updrawn, L., 228.t He had greatly changed his idea of a perfect garden, in that poem, where the brooks, but not the shades, are crisped] * By the great Lord Chatham, who had a good taste himself in modern gardening, as he shewed by his own villas in Enfield Chace and at Hayes. [Wheatley's Essay, p. 129.] + [Has not Tasso described a garden of equal beauty, and not less applicable to the modern style? Every lover of this art, will recur to the well known stanza in the XVIth Canto, which concludes, "L'Arte che tutto fá, nulla si scopre." It is likewise exemplified by a passage in "Paradise Regained," and enter'd soon the shade; High-rooft, and walks beneath, and alleys brown, Nature's own work it seemed (Nature taught Art) B. 2, v. 289.] What colouring, what freedom of pencil, what landscape in these lines, from that saphire fount the crisped brooks, p. 237-245.* Read this transporting description, paint to your mind the scenes that follow, contrast them with the savage but respectable terror with which the poet guards the bounds of his Paradise, fenced with the champain head Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild Insuperable height of loftiest shade, Cedar and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend, Of stateliest view B. 4, l. 141. and then recollect that the author of this sublime * [Not to insist on less decisive marks of imitation, the lines, B. 4, v. 257, clearly copy the Cave of Calypso, as described by Homer. And Spenser has an analogous idea "For all that Nature by her mother wit Could frame in earth, and form of substance base Art, (playing Nature's second part) supplied it." Fairy Queen, B. 4, Canto 10.] |