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OLD GAEDENS AND THEIR BENEWAIx. 



1 1 28. There is something to reverence in the veiy 

 idea of an "old garden." To the imaginative it suggests 

 recollections of old baronial fortalices of the York and 

 Lancaster wars, whose walls and battlements were levelled 

 under the firmer policy and more peaceful times of the 

 Tudors ; grey weather-beaten stone walls, deep oriel-windows, heavy clustering 

 chimneys, half-hidden, half-revealed, by masses of dark glossy ivy ; broad 

 gravel terraces, with retaining-walls and balustrades, decorated with Italian 

 vases, resting on the foundations of the old battlements, with rich green lawn, 

 andshrubbery, and park, — cornfields, meadows, villages, and spires, extending 

 far beyond, until lost in the distance. This lordly picture may be replaced by the 

 more humble priory-houses or abbey wrested from the Church, whose gardens 

 were laid out by the " monks of old," who well knew how to select a jjleasant 

 and fertile site, and how to use it ; or, it may be, by some snug Elizabethan 

 cottage, so called, just far enough removed from the village, and at its best 

 end, to give its inhabitants room to breathe, — a place of "lettered ease;" 

 with mullioned windows, covered with creepers and perpetual roses ; with 

 dormered roof and many-angled gables, standing in a lawn, smooth, green, and 



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