suckles and holidays;'* and which is so and, where the ground admits of them, conspicuous in our own Shakspeare as to tiers rising one above the other-vases and have led to some late ingenious surmises statues (not half hidden in a shrubbery, or that he was born and bred a gardener. † indiscriminately scattered over a lawn, but) Addison amused himself by comparing connected, and in character with the house the different styles of gardening with those itself-these, with marble fountains and of poetry-Your makers of parterres and such relics of antiquity as may have been flower-gardens are epigrammatists and son- discovered in the neighbourhood, form the netteers; contrivers of bowers and grottos, chief beauties of the magnificent gardens of treillages and cascades, are romance-writ- Italy, which have in many instances swalers; while the gravel-pits in Kensington lowed up the whole wealth of their princely Gardens, then just laid out by London and possessors. Spite of Walpole's sneer about Wise, were heroic verse. If our modern walking up and down stairs in the open critics were to draw a similar comparison, air,' we own that there are to us few things we suppose our gardens would be divided so beautiful in art as stately terraces, tier into the Classical and the Romantic. The above tier, and bold flights of stone steps, first would embrace the works of the Italian, now stretching forward in a broad unbroken Dutch, and French, the second those of the course, now winding around the angle of Chinese and English schools. The cha- the terrace in short and steep descents, each racteristics of the three symmetric styles landing affording some new scene, some are not easily to be distinguished, but from change of sun or shade-a genial baskingthe climate and character of the nations, per- place, or cool retreat-here the rich perhaps even more than from the actual ex-fume of an ancestral* orange-tree, there amples existing in their respective coun- the bright blossom of some sunny creeper-tries, a division has been made which is while at another turn a balcony juts out to recognized in most works on gardening, catch some distant view, or a recess is and may be useful in practice in keeping formed with seats for the loitering party to us to that leading idea' on which the cri- rest and be thankful.' Let all these be tics insist so strongly, but which has been connected by colonnades with the architecsadly neglected in most modern examples. ture of the mansion, and you have a far The Italian style is undoubtedly the off- more rational appendage to its necessarily spring, or rather the continuation, of the artificial character than the petty wilderxystus and quincunx of the ancient Ro- nesses and picturesque abandon which With them the garden was only have not been without advocates up to the the amplification of the house: if indeed very lintel and threshold. their notion of a villa did not almost sink Isola Bella, the creation of Vitaliano the consideration of the roofed rooms in Borromeo, may be considered as the extrathe magnificence of the colonnades and ter- vagant type of the Italian style. A barren races that surrounded them. The same rock, rising in the midst of a lake, and prospirit has animated the style of modern ducing nothing but a few poor lichens, has Italy. The garden immediately about the been converted into a pyramid of terraces, house is but the extension of the style and supported on arches, and ornamented with materials of which the buildings themselves bays and orange-trees of amazing size and are composed. Broad paved terraces mans. * σμídakos özwv kaι anpaypoσívns. Aristoph. Nub. 1007. beauty. The French are theatrical even in their gardens. There is an effort after spectacle We may perhaps return to the subject of anand display which, while it wants the grace cient gardens. Meanwhile we answer to Daines of the Italians, is yet free from the pueriliBarrington's remark, that, 'he knew of no Greek or ties of the Dutch. The gardens of VerLatin word for nosegay,' that the ancients wore their sailles may be taken as the great exemplar flowers on their head, not in their bosom; and there of this style; and magnificent indeed they is surely mention enough about crέpavoi' and 'co rona. But we need hardly wonder at such an over- are, if expense and extent and variety sufsight in an anthor who, noticing the passages on fice to make up magnificence. Two hunflowers in our early poets, makes no allusion to Shaks-dred acres and two hundred millions of peare. To H. Walpole, who says 'their gardens are never mentioned as affording shade and shelter francs were the materials which Louis from the rage of the dog-star,' we can now only XIV. handed over to Le Nôtre, where quote -'platanum potantibus umbram ;' with to construct them. To draw petty figures in dwarf-box, and elaborate patterns There are in Holland many orange-trees which one at Versailles has the inscription Semé en 1421.' and Hor. ii. xi. 13. The platanus was the newly in- have been in the same family 200 and 300 years; troduced garden-wonder of the Augustan age. in particoloured sand, might well be dispensed with where the formal style was carried out with such magnificence as this, but otherwise the designs of Le Nôtre differ little from that of his predecessors in the Geometric style, save in their monstrous extent. This is the grand manner' of which Batty Langley, in his New Principles of Gardening,' published in 1728, has given such extraordinary specimens. We wish it were only possible for us to transfer a few of his designs to these pages, that the absurdity of that fashion might be fully shown up. Some notion may be formed of his system, to which we may perhaps return, from his starting with the principle that the 'true end and design of laying out gardens of pleasure is, that we may never know when we have seen the whole.'* The great wonder of Versailles was the well-known labyrinth, not such a maze as is really the source of much idle amusement at Hampton Court, but a mere ravel of interminable walks, closely fenced in with high hedges, in which thirtynine of Esop's Fables were represented by painted copper figures of birds and beasts, each group connected with a separate fountain, and all spouting water out of their mouths. A more dull and fatuous notion it never entered into the mind of bloated extravagance to conceive.t Every tree was here planted with geometrical exactness,-parterre answered to parterre across half-a-mile of gravel, 'Grove nods to grove, each alley has its brother, And half the garden just reflects the other.' 'Such symmetry,' says Lord Byron, is not for solitude;' and certainly the gardens of Versailles were not planted with any such intent. The Parisians do not throng * Brown-who, though an uneducated man, and alluded to, we suppose, by Sir W. Chambers where he speaks of 'peasants emerging from the melonground to take the periwig and turn professor,' left many good sayings behind him-used to say of these tortuous walks, that you might put one foot upon zig and the other upon zag. + Some idea may be formed of the more than childishness of the thing from a contemporary account. These water-works represent several of Esop's Fables: the animals are all of brass and painted in their proper colours, and are so well assigned, that they seem to be in the very action the Fable supposes them in, and the more so, for that they cast water out of their mouths, alluding to the form of speech the Fable renders them in. Here follows the description of a particular fountain. 'Fable XIII. The Fox and the Crane.-Upon a rock stands a Fox with the Crane; the Fox is lapping somewhat on a flat gilded dish, the water spreads itself in the form of a table-cloth; the Crane by way of complaint spouts up water into the air; and so on through thirty-eight others.- Versailles Illustrated, 1726. there for the contemplation to be found in the trim gardens' of Milton. There is indeed a melancholy, but not a pleasing one, in wandering alone through those many acres of formal hornbeam, where we feel that it requires the 'galliard and elinquant' air of a scene of Watteau-its crowds and love-making-its hoops and minuets—a ringing laugh and merry tambourine-to make us recognize the real genius of the place. Taking Versailles as the gigantic type of the French school, it need scarcely be said that it embraces broad gravelled terraces, long alleys of yew and hornbeam, vast orangeries, groves planted in the quincunx style, and water-works embellished with, and conducted through, every variety of sculptured ornament. It takes the middle line between the other two geometric schools; admitting more sculpture and other works of art than the Italian, but not overpowered with the same number of huge masses of littleness' as the Dutch, There is more of promenade, less of parterre; more gravel than turf; more of the deciduous than of the evergreen tree. The practical water-wit of drenching the spectators was in high vogue in the ancient French gardens; and Evelyn, in his account of the Duke of Richelieu's villa, describes with some relish how on going, two extravagant musketeers shot at us with a stream of water from their musketbarrels.' Contrivances for dousing the visitors especially the ladies' — which once filled so large a space in the catalogue of every show-place, seem to militate a little against the national character for gallantry; but the very fact that everything was done to surprise the spectator and stranger evinces how different was their idea of a garden from the home and familiar pleasures which an Englishman looks to in his. Paintings on a large scale, and illusive perspectives at the end of their avenues, may be ranked among their characteristic embellishments. But during the madness of the Revolu tion, gardens of course could not be allowed alone to remain unaltered; and as Reason and Nature were to carry everything before them, here too the English style was An instance of these agreeable deceptions,' perfectly characteristic of the French taste of the day, may be given from Evelyn's tour: In the Rue de la Seine is a little garden, which, though very narrow, by the addition of a well-painted perspective, is to appearance greatly enlarged; to this there is another part, supported by arches, in which runs a stream of water, rising in the aviary, out of a statue, and seeming to flow for some miles, by being artificially continued in the painting, where it sinks down at the wall,' In the neighbourhood of Antwerp is a lawn with sheep-like the grey wethers of Salisbury Plain-of stone, and shepherd and dog of the same material to match. Generally, however, the scissors and the yew-tree make up the main furniture' of the garden; and there is something so venerable, and even classical,* about cones and pyramids, and peacocks of box and yew, that we should be loth to destroy a single specimen of the topiary art that was not in flagrant disconnection with the scene around it. of course adopted with the same enthusiasm and intelligence as they showed in taking up the democratic parts of our constitution. Ermenonville, the seat of Viscomte Girardin, was the first place of consequence laid out in the natural style, and a more complete specimen of French adaptation was never heard of. We have not space even to glance at half its charms; but some idea of the genius loci may be conveyed from the fact that a garden in ruins' was one of its lions. And it seems that the Viscomte kept a band of musicians continually moving about, now on water, However, the most striking and indisnow on land, to draw the attention of visi-pensable feature of a private garden in the tors to the right points of view at the right Dutch style is the lust-huis, or pleasuretime of the day; while Madame and her house, hundreds of which overlook every daughters, in a sweet mixture of the natu- public road and canal in Holland. Perched ral, the revolutionary, and the romantic, pro- on the angle of the high wall of the enclomenaded the grounds, dressed in brown sure, or flanking or bestriding the stagnant stuff, en amazones,' with black hats; and canalulet which bounds the garden, in all the young men wore 'habillements les plus the gaiety and cleanliness of fresh paint, simples et le plus propres à les faire confon- these little rooms form the resort, in sumdre avec les enfans des campagnards.'* One mer and autumn evenings, of the owners instance, more Frenchified and ridiculous and their families, who, according to sex still, was that of the 'Moulin Joli' of Wate- and age, indulge themselves with pipes and let. He was a writer of a system of gar- beer, tea and gossip, or in observing the dening on utilitarian principles; but, hav- passengers along the high road,-while ing erected divers temples and altars about these, in their turn, are amused with the his grounds, he felt himself bound, in con- amiable and pithy mottoes on the pavillions, sistency with his theory, to employ occa- which set forth the Pleasure and Ease,' sionally troops of sacrificers and worship. Friendship and Sociability,' &c. &c., of pers, to give his gimcrack pagodas and the family-party within. shrines the air of utility! In good keeping with his garden was the encomium of the Prince de Ligne. Allez-y, incrédules! Méditez sur les inscriptions que le gout y a dictées. Méditez avec le sage, soupirez avec l'amant, et bénissez Watelet.' The line of demarcation between the Dutch and French styles is perhaps more imaginary than real. The same exact symmetry everywhere prevails. There is a profusion of ornaments, only on a smaller scale, 'Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees, with stagnant and muddy canals and ditches, purposely made for the bridge that is thrown over them; but they abound also in the pleasanter accompaniments of grassy banks and slopes, green terraces, caves, waterworks, banquetting-houses set on mounds, with a profusion of trellis-work and green paint furnished,' in the words of Evelyn, with whatever may render the place agreeable, melancholy, and country-like, not forgetting a hedge of jets d'eau surrounding a parterre.' * Gaz. Lit. de l'Europe, quoted by Loudon, Encyc., p. 86. We have thought it necessary to give a slight sketch of the principal continental styles, before we entered upon the consideration of that which is universally recognized as appropriate to the English garden. In a former number of our Review a history of the changes that have passed over English gardens was given, in his usual happy manner, by Sir Walter Scott, which precludes the necessity of more than a passing reference to the same subject. London and Wise were among the earliest innovators on the old Dutch school in England, and received the high praise of Addison in the 'Spectator' for the introduction of a more natural manner in Kensington Gardens, then newly laid out. Bridgeman followed, laying the axe to the root of many a verdurous peacock and lion of Lincolngreen. Kent, the inventor of the Ha-ha, broke through the visible and formal boundary, and confounded the distinction between the garden and the park. Brown, of capability' memory, succeeded, with his round clumps, boundary belts, seminatural rivers, extensive lakes, broad green * See Pliny and Martial-we may say passim. drives, with the everlasting portico summerhouse at the end. Castle Howard, Blenheim, and Stowe, were the great achievements of these times; while the bard of the Leasowes was creating his sentimental farm, rearing,' says D'Israeli, 'hazels and hawthorns, opening vistas, and winding waters,' And having shown them where to stray, displaying according to the English rhymes of a noble foreigner who raised a 'plain stone' to the memory of Shenstone' —‘a mind natural,' in laying out ‘Arcadian greens rural.”* Whateley's book completed the revolution. It was instantly translated into French, the Anglomanie' being then at its height; and though the clipped pyramids and hedges did not fall so recklessly as in England, yet no place of any pretension was considered perfect without the addition of its jardin Anglais.' The natural style was now for some time, in writings and practice, completely triumphant. At length came out Price on the Picturesque,' who once more drew the distinction between the parterre and the forest, in opposition to the straggling, scrambling style, which Whateley called combining the excellences of the garden and the park.' From the times of Socrates and Epicurus to those of Wesley, Simeon, and Pusey, the same story is to be told; and if theology and philosophy could not escape, how should poor gardening expect to go free? * Dr. Johnson, who, we think, used to boast either that he did or did not (and it is much the same) know a cabbage from a cabbage-rose, has a passage in his Life of Shenstone' so perfectly Johnsonian that we must transcribe it:- Now was excited his delight in rural pleasures, and his ambition of rural elegance; he began from this time to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful-a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers. Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves, and to place a bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view-to make water run where it will be heard, and to stagnate where will be seen-o leave intervals where the eye be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden-demand any great powers of the mind, I will not inquire: perhaps a surly and sullen spectator may think such performances rather the sport than the business of human reason. But it must at least be confessed that to embellish the it will form of nature is an innocent amusement, and some praise must be allowed by the most scrupulous observer to him who does best what multitudes are contending to do well.' Horace Walpole's description of M. Boutin's garden. VOL. LXX. 15 It is the natural effect of the bold enunciation of a broad principle, that it will oftener be strained to cover extreme cases than be applied to the general bearing of the subject. Withdraw the pure and intelligent mind that first directed its application, and hundreds of professed disciples and petty imitators spring up, whose optics are sharpsighted enough to see the faults condemned in the old system, though their comprehension is too limited to embrace the whole range of truth and beauty in the new; with just so much knowledge as to call up a maxim or phrase for the purpose of distorting it, and passing it on the world as the ipse dixit of the master, though without intellect enough to perceive the time, the measure, or the place, which alone make its application desirable. Wilkes was at much trouble to assure George III. that he was not a Wilkite; and if many an ordinary man has need at times to exclaim, Preserve me from my friends,' all great ones have much more reason to cry out, Defend me from my disciples.' Perhaps all this is a little too grandiloquent for our humble subject; but if a marked example of discipular ultraism and perversion were wanting, no stronger one could be found than that supplied by the followers of Price. And if we have made more of this matter than it deserves, we care not, for our great object is to impress upon our readers that this unfortunate word picturesque' has been the ruin of our gardens. Price himself never dreamt of applying it, in its present usage, to the plot of ground immediately surrounding the house. His own words are all along in favour of a formal and artificial character there, in keeping with the mansion itself; and as Sir Walter Scott remarks, he expresses in a tone of exquisite feeling his regret at his own destruction of a garden on the old system. He might, indeed, have used the term with reference to those splendid terraces, arcades, and balconies of Italy with which we are familiar in the architectural pictures of Panini; but he would have shrunk with horror to have his theory applied to justify the substitution of tadpole, and leech, and comma, and sausage figures for the trim gardens of symmetrical forms, even though he might see in them (as Addison says) 'the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush.' Scott very justly finds fault with the term landscape gardening,' which is another that has proved fatal to our parterres. If such a word as 'landscaping,' be inadmissible, it is high time to find some phrase which will express the laying out of park scenery, as completely distinct from gardening' as the things themselves are. Since the publication of Price's book no writer has appeared advocating any particular theory or system of gardening. Principles and practice have become of a like composite order, and, in general it has been left to the gardener to adopt at his own pleasure, the stucco, and cast-iron and wire ornaments, that fashion has from time to time produced, to suit the last importations or the favourite flower of the season. The early part of the nineteenth century presents a great coolness in the garden mania with which the eighteenth was so possessed; and it was hardly till after the peace that public attention again took this direction. We presume that it will only be in the philosophical fashion of the day to say that this was a natural reaction of the public mind, after the turmoil of a foreign war, to fall back upon the more peaceful occupations of home. The institution of the Horticultural Society of London, however, took place a little earlier, and it no doubt gave both a stimulus and a stability to the growing taste of the nation. to build stately sooner than to garden finely. To attempt, therefore, to disguise Though it may be questioned whether a wholly its artificial character is as great folpicture should be the ultimate test of the ly as if men were to make their houses retaste in laying out gardens and grounds, semble as much as possible the rudeness of a Price, even on this view, offers some very natural cavern. So much mawkish sentiingenious arguments in defence not only of mentality had been talked about the natural Italian but even of the old English gar- style, that even Price himself dared not asden; and his feelings now would evidently sert that a garden must be avowedly arhave led him still further to adopt the for- tificial. And though now it seems nothing mal system, had his theory not stood a strange to hazard such a remark, yet its little in the way. He seems to recognize a truth still requires to be brought more boldthreefold division of the domain-the ar-ly and closely home to us before we can exchitectural terrace, and flower-garden in pect to see our gardens what they ought to direct connection with the house, where he be. admits the formal style; the shrubbery or pleasure-ground, a transition between the flowers and the trees, which he would hand over to the natural style' of Brown and his school; and, thirdly, the park, which he considers the proper domain of his own system. This is a distinction which it would be well for every proprietor to keep in view, not for the sake of a monotonous adherence to its divisions in every case, but in order to remember that the tree, the shrub, and the flower, though they may be occasionally mingled with effect, yet require a separate treatment, and the application of distinct principles, where they are to be exhibited each in its full perfection. Our present subject of complaint is the encroachments which the natural and picturesque styles have made upon the regular flower-garden. Manufacturers of bye-lanes and lightning-struck cottages are all very well in their own department, but that must -not be in the vicinity of the house. We suppose that even Whateley himself would admit that the steps and threshold of the door must be symmetrical, and would pro- It may be amusing to run over some few bably allow a straight pathway more appro- statistics of the progress of horticulture priate, and even more natural than a wind- since that time. It is now only thirty-three ing one, leading directly to the door of the years since the foundation of the Lonhouse. Once get a single straight line, don Society, the first comprehensive institueven the outline of the building itself, and tion of its kind: there are now in Great Briit then becomes merely a matter of situation, tain at least 200 provincial societies, foundor convenience, or taste, how far the straight ed more or less upon its model. We find lines and right angles shall be extended; merely in the Gardener's Chronicle' for and though nature must needs be removed last year notices of the exhibitions of 120 a few paces further into her own proper re- different societies. Everything else connecttreat, yet simplicity may still remain in re-ed with gardening has increased in the like gular and symmetrical forms, as much as in proportion. There were at that time not undulations and irregularities and mole- more than two botanical, and those stricthills under the very windows of the draw-ly scientific, periodical works; there are ing-room. Nothing, as Scott has remark- now at least twenty monthly publications, ed, is more completely the child of art than a garden. It is, indeed, in our modern sense of the term, one of the last refinements of civilized life. A man shall ever see,' says Lord Bacon, that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come each devoted to some branch or other of botany or horticulture; and, what may perhaps still more surprise those of our readers who live apart from the influence of the gardening world, there are or were very lately, published every week three newspapers |