in which the pleasures of the garden are more needed, and none in which they are more keenly appreciated, than in our own. And probably from the time the Romans first introduced gardening into Britain, its popularity was assured. One of the many reasons we have to be grateful to the old monks of the dark ages is that they assiduously cultivated the art of gardening, and spread the taste for this kindly art.

In one of his most delightful essays, Lord Bacon discourses "Of Gardens," and opens with this high eulogy of his subject: "God Almighty first planted a garden, and indeed, it is the purest of human pleasure. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks; and a man shall ever see that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately, sooner tuan to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection."

And Abraham Cowley in his epistle to John Evelyn says: "I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden." Milton, Pope, and Thomson were all enthusiastic lovers of gardens. Indeed, Byron used to say that he had a pride in thinking that our national taste, as it is conceived to be shown in what is called an English garden, had grown up less under the influence of our landscape-painters than under that of our descriptive poets, more especially Milton and Pope. Let us glance then for a moment at the history of the British garden, and the various phases through which it has passed before reaching its present stage.

In the essay on gardens to which we have already referred, Bacon gives us a picture of the beau ideal of a garden in his day. The principal and most noteworthy feature of the English garden then was the aim to make it perennial, a garden for all the months of the year, with something to please the eye in winter, spring, summer, and autumn-a source of perpetual refresh

ment and delight, from one end of the year to the other. And the great philosopher gives a list of all the plants and flowers suitable for each month, from January to December-a list which even your modern scientific Scotch gardener might do well to study. A square garden, encompassed on all sides with a stately arched hedge, covering thirty acres of ground, divided into three parts; "a green in the entrance, a heath or desert in the goingforth, and the main garden in the midst, besides alleys on both sides," that was Bacon's ideal. All elaborate trickery and device he despised, but he liked order, and system, and elegance. Above all, he made much of the perfume of flowers, a point on which, to our thinking, far too little stress is laid in the gardens of the present day. "And because," says he "the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it cometh and goeth like the warbling of musick) than in the hand; therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that doe best perfume the air." And then he goes on to enumerate those sweet-smelling old English flowers, which, alas! modern fashion too often banishes to make room for the gaudy glare of "bedding out." So enamoured was Bacon of the perfume of flowers, that he was ready to go to any extravagance to secure it. He gravely recommended opening a turf or two in the garden alleys, and pouring therein a bottle of claret “to re-create the sense of smelling, being no less grateful than beneficial!" On the whole, then, we gather that a garden in the Tudor style must have been most thoroughly what the old writers term "a pleasaunce," a place in which a man might take his pleasure, full of all that was bright in color and sweet in perfume.

This was the old English garden which had its day from the reign of Henry VII. to nearly the close of Elizabeth's. It was during this period that most of our common garden flowers were introduced from abroad. The oldest of them appears to be the lily, which was brought from Italy in 1460,

Provence, Flanders, Italy, and the Netherlands seem to have simultaneously sent us our choice garden roses in 1522. From the Alps came the ranunculus, and from Italy the mignonette in 1528, rosemary from the south of Europe in 1534, the jasmine from Circassia about 1548. The year 1567 saw the introduction of four timehonored favorites, the auricula from Switzerland, the pink from Italy, the gillyflower and carnation from Flanders. Spenser, by the way, in the "Shephearde's Calendar" (1579), classes the carnation, which he calls "coronation," with the purple columbine and the gillyflower as lovers' flowers. Now the carnation is generally supposed to have derived its name from the carnation or flesh color of the original species. But the word used by Spenser suggests that "carnation" is merely an abbreviation of "coronation" in allusion to the crown-like appearance of the flower, and its specific name, Betonica coronaria. The Philological Society's "New English Dictionary" does not decide which of the derivations is the only true one, though one must have originated in a mistake. Anyhow, the shorter form common in Shakespeare's time, and we have it on Dame Quickly's authority that Sir John Falstaff "could never abide carnation; 'twas a color he never liked." Lavender was imported from the south of Europe not later than 1568, and the laburnum from Hungary about 1576; while Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with having brought the snowdrop back with him from his shortlived colony of Roanoke, an island off North Carolina, in 1584.

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But the old English style, towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, was superseded by the Italian. The Italians loved embellishment, and liked a mixture of architecture in their gardens. Statues, temples, alcoves, porticos, were combined with terraces, balustrades, flights of steps, alleys, broad paved walks, fountains, beds of flowering shrubs, thick walls of box and fern, secluded bowers, and grottos buried in the dense shade of over-arching trees. There are still examples of the Italian garden to

be found up and down England. But in Charles II.'s time, this style, in its turn, was put out of fashion by the French, a style which may be tersely described as the Italian reduced to a system of mathematical precision. Everything was confined to rigidly geometrical forms-squares, straight lines, rhomboids, parallelograms everything was measured out with the compass, and docked into uniformity with the shears. The gardens of Versailles still give some idea of the stiff ugliness which was the product of this style.

But the Dutch, with characteristic ingenuity, contrived to graft an even more hideous style on the outlines of the Italian. Nature was more sternly suppressed than ever. The rectangle was the Dutch beau ideal of shape, and the line of beauty was of rigid straightness. Fish-ponds took the place of fountains, and canals of terraces; the yew-trees were cut into the shapes of peacocks or monkeys, the box-trees into the figures of men or elephants. Of course, when William of Orange came over, the Dutch fashion rose into the ascendant, and English gardens were laid out in strict imitation of the angular regularity of the flower-beds of Haarlem and the Hague. Traces of the Dutch style may still be seen at Hampton Court; and Sir William Temple has, in his "Essay on Gardening," left us a minute and vivid picture of a model garden of this type, that of the Countess of Bedford at Moor Park, which he said was "the perfectest figure of a garden, and the sweetest place" he had ever seen at home or abroad.

Thus, on the originally magnificent Italian style had been grafted the severe formality of the French, and the grotesque meanness of the Dutch. Artificiality had now been carried to its extreme, it could go no further, and then came the inevitable reaction.

It would be difficult to assign a precise date to this reaction; but we can trace the first symptoms of it in Addison's time. In his essay on the "Pleasures of the Imagination," he

notes how much less entertaining to the fancy, and how much less charming to the eye, are the neatness and elegance of English gardens than the artificial rudeness of the Italians with their mixture of garden and forest. And in a subsequent letter to "The Spectator," he describes a homely, old-fashioned English garden of the style which prevailed before foreign tastes had become acclimatized here. "A garden," he tells us, "altogether after the Pindaric manner, and run into the beautiful wildness of nature, without affecting the nicer elegance of art."

It was, however, about the middle of the last century that this reaction in favor of nature reached its climax. But the Nature whom it then became fashionable to worship was a mere ideal goddess, evolved out of the emotional sentimentality of certain poets and philosophers. The first rule of the new school was in everything to go exactly contrary to their predecessors. Elaborate design had been the great object and main feature of the French and Dutch styles; elaborate absence of design was, therefore, adopted as the first principle of the new style. The most excruciating minuteness was observed in copying the careless profusion and rude grandeur of nature. Poor Sir William Temple was bitterly ridiculed for his panegyric of the model garden of Moor Park. "Caractacus" Mason in his dreary poem, "The English Garden," Horace Walpole in his elegant "Essay on Gardening," satirized unmercifully that faultless specimen of the prosaic Dutch style.

Hugh Miller has called William Shenstone the "Prince of landscape-gardeners." He became more celebrated for his gardening than his poetry, and carried out his whims and taste in gardening at the Leasowes, near Halesowen, Worcestershire. There was ૧ mania for the picturesque, and Sir Uvedale Price and "Capability" Brown had it all their own way for a time as the inaugurators of landscape-gardening. They prided themselves on being much more natural than Nature herself. There was no landscape, they held,

which was not capable of being improved under their manipulation. A group of trees added here, an elaborately artificial "natural" rock there, an accurately constructed ancient ruin in one place, a cunningly devised impromptu waterfall in another, a vista here, a bowery retreat there - there was no end to the "improvements" effected by the new landscape-gardeners. They inaugurated an age of shams and surprises, such as Thomas Love Peacock has so happily satirized in "Melincourt." A tawdry, paltry, cockney imitation of nature became the rage. Horace Walpole made Strawberry Hill a perfect type of the new style, and he and those like him plumed themselves on their love of nature, while they were really patronizing a grosser and more affected form of artificiality than their predecessors, who were the professed worshippers of art.

The new picturesque school made the "designless beauty" of nature their model, and as an example of their fidelity to that model, we may take William Kent, the designer of Kensington Gardens, who, the more effectually to conceal every vestige of a plan, had some dead trees planted so as to give a natural appearance to the whole!

This mock-natural system became known as the "English style," though it is a moot-point whether it would not be more correct to term it the Chinese style; for the supposition is that the idea was derived from the Celestial Empire-the "Kingdom of Flowers," as the Chinese poets call it.

The Chinese were believed to have possessed great skill in landscapegardening from a very early period, though, if we are to judge from the illustrations on the famous "willow pattern" plates, there is some excuse for doubting the extent of that skill. It is true that a very ancient Chinese writer, Lieu-Tscheu, has some extremely sensible remarks on the pleasures of a garden, in the course of which he says: "The art of laying out gardens consists, therefore, in con