And sculptured foliage; to the lawn restore Bacon Yes-" verdure soothes the eye :"—and the mind too. himself observes, that "nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn." Mason slightly qualifies his commendation of "the sage" by admitting that he had not quite completed his emancipation from the bad taste of his day. Witness his high arched hedge In pillored state by carpentry upborn, With colored mirrors decked and prisoned birds. There smiles in varied tufts the velvet rose, There flaunts the gadding woodbine, swells the ground Through blossomed shades the secret pathway steals. The English Garden. In one of the notes to The English Garden it is stated that "Bacon was the prophet, Milton the herald of modern Gardening; and Addison, Pope, and Kent the champions of true taste." Kent was by profession both a Painter and a LandscapeGardener. Addison who had a pretty little retreat at Bilton, near Rugby, evinces in most of his occasional allusions to gardens a correct judgment. He complains that even in his time our British gardeners, instead of humouring nature, loved to deviate from it as much as possible. The system of verdant sculpture had not gone out of fashion. Our trees still rose in cones, Showing, as in a model, our firm estate? There is an allusion to garden knots in Holinshed's Chronicle. In 1512 the Earl of Northumberland "had but one gardener who attended hourly in the garden for setting of erbis and chipping of knottis and sweeping the said garden clean." globes, and pyramids. The work of the scissors was on every plant and bush. It was Pope, however, who did most to bring the topiary style into contempt and to encourage a more natural taste, by his humorous paper in the Guardian, and his poetical Epistle to the Earl of Burlington. Gray, the poet, observes in one of his letters, that "our skill in gardening, or rather laying out grounds, is the only taste we can call our own; the only proof of original talent in matters of pleasure. This is no small honor to us;" he continues," since neither France nor Italy, has ever had the least notion of it." "Whatever may have been reported, whether truly or falsely" (says a contributor to The World)" of the Chinese gardens, it is certain that we are the first of the Europeans who have founded this taste; and we have been so fortunate in the genius of those who have had the direction of some of the finest spots of ground, that we may now boast a success equal to that profusion of expense which has been destined to promote the rapid progress of this happy enthusiasm. Our gardens are already the astonishment of foreigners, and, in proportion as they accustom themselves to consider and understand them will become their admiration." The periodical from which this is taken was published exactly a century ago, and the writer's prophecy has been long verified. Foreigners send to us for gardeners to help them to lay out their grounds in the English fashion. And we are told by the writer of an interesting article on gardens, in the Quarterly Review, that "the lawns at Paris, to say nothing of Naples, are regularly irrigated to keep up even the semblance of English verdure; and at the gardens of Versailles, and Caserta, near Naples, the walks have been supplied from the Kensington gravel-pits." "It is not probably known," adds the same writer, "that among our exportations every year is a large quantity of evergreens for the markets of France and Germany, and that there are some nurserymen almost wholly engaged in this branch of trade." Pomfret, a poet of small powers, if a poet at all, has yet contrived to produce a popular composition in verse-The Choice-because he has touched with great good fortune on some of the sweetest domestic hopes and enjoyments of his countrymen. If Heaven the grateful liberty would give In blissful ease and satisfaction spend; Near some fair town I'd have a private seat Built uniform; not little; nor too great: Better if on a rising ground it stood, On this side fields, on that a neighbouring wood. 66 The Choice. Pomfret perhaps illustrates the general taste when he places his garden near some fair town." Our present laureate, though a truly inspired poet, and a genuine lover of Nature even in her remotest retreats, has the garden of his preference," not quite beyond the busy world." Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite Even "sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh" are often pleasing when mellowed by the space of air through which they pass. 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the sound. Shelley, in one of his sweetest poems, speaking of a scene in the neighbourhood of Naples, beautifully says: Like many a voice of one delight, The winds, the birds, the ocean floods, The city's voice itself is soft, like solitude's. No doubt the feeling that we are near the crowd but not in it, may deepen the sense of our own happy rural seclusion and doubly endear that pensive leisure in which we can "think down hours to moments," and in This our life, exempt from public haunt, Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing. Shakspeare. Besides, to speak truly, few men, however studious or philosophical, desire a total isolation from the world. It is pleasant to be able to take a sort of side glance at humanity, even when we are most in love with nature, and to feel that we can join our fellow creatures again when the social feeling returns upon us. Man was not made to live alone. Cowper, though he dearly loved retirement and a garden, did not desire to have the pleasure entirely to himself. "Grant me," he says, 66 a friend in my retreat." To whom to whisper solitude is sweet. Cowper lived and died a bachelor. In the case of a married man and a father, garden delights are doubled by the presence of the family and friends, if wife and children happen to be what they should be, and the friends are genuine and genial. All true poets delight in gardens. The truest that ever lived spent his latter days at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. He had a spacious and beautiful garden. Charles Knight tells us that "the Avon washed its banks; and within its enclosures it had its sunny terraces and green lawns, its pleached alleys and honeysuckle bowers." In this garden Shakspeare planted with his own hands his celebrated Mulberry tree. It was a noble specimen of the black Mulberry introduced into England in 1548.* In 1605, James I. issued a Royal edict recommending the cultivation of silkworms and offering packets of mulberry seeds to those amongst his subjects who were willing to sow them. Shakspeare's tree was planted in 1609. Mr. Loudon observes that the black Mulberry has been known from the earliest records of antiquity and that it is twice mentioned in the Bible: namely, in the second Book of Samuel and in the Psalms. When New Place was in the possession of Sir Hough Clopton, who was proud of its interesting association with the history of our great poet, not only were Garrick and Macklin most hospitably entertained under the Mulberry tree, but all strangers on a proper application were admitted to a sight of it. But when Sir Hough Clopton was succeeded by the Reverend Francis Gastrell, that gentleman, to save himself * Ovid, in his story of Pyramus and Thisbe, tells us that the black Mulberry was originally white. The two lovers killed themselves under a white Mulberry tree and the blood penetrating to the roots of the tree mixed with the sap and gave its color to the fruit. the trouble of showing the tree to visitors, had "the gothic barbarity" to cut down and root up that interestingindeed sacred memorial-of the Pride of the British Isles. The people of Stratford were so enraged at this sacrilege that they broke Mr. Gastrell's windows. That prosaic personage at last found the place too hot for him, and took his departure from a town whose inhabitants "doated on his very absence;" but before he went he completed the full sum of his sins against good taste and good feeling by pulling to the ground the house in which Shakespeare had lived and died. This was done, it is said, out of sheer spite to the towns-people, with some of whom Mr. Gastrell had had a dispute about the rate at which the house was taxed. His change of residence was no great relief to him, for the whole British public felt sorely aggrieved, and wherever he went he was peppered with all sorts of squibs and satires. He "slid into verse," and "hitched in a rhyme." Sacred to ridicule his whole life long, And the sad burden of a merry song. Thomas Sharp, a watchmaker, got possession of the fragments of Shakespeare's Mulberry tree, and worked them into all sorts of elegant ornaments and toys, and disposed of them at great prices. The corporation of Stratford presented Garrick with the freedom of the town in a box made of the wood of this famous tree, and the compliment seems to have suggested to him his public festival or pageant in honor of the poet. This Jubilee, which was got up with great zeal, and at great expense and trouble, was attended by vast throngs of the admirers of Shakespeare from all parts of the kingdom. It was repeated on the stage and became so popular as a theatrical exhibition that it was represented night after night for more than half a season to crowded audiences. Upon the subject of gardens, let us hear what has been said by the self-styled "melancholy Cowley." When in the smoky city pent, amidst the busy hum of men, he sighed unceasingly for some green retreat. As he paced the crowded thorough-fares of London, he thought of the velvet turf and pure air of the country. His imagination carried him into secluded groves or to the bank of a murmuring river, or the H |