HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 95 



excelled, and to condemn device that represents the 

 inspired dreams of some of England's elect sons. 



To our sorry groundling minds the old pleasaunce 

 may seem too rich and fantastic, too spectacular, too 

 much idealised. And if to be English one must 

 needs be bourgeois, the objection must stand. Mere 

 is developed garden-craft, and development almost 

 invariably means multiplicity of forms and a marked 

 departure from primaeval simplicity. Grant, if you 

 will, that Art is carried too far, and Nature not 

 carried far enough in the old garden, yet did it 

 deserve better treatment. Judged both from its 

 human and its artistic side, the place is as loveable 

 as it is pathetic. It has the pathos of all art that 

 survives its creators, the pathos of all abandoned 

 human idols, of all high human endeavour that is 

 blown upon. What is more, it holds, as it were, the 

 spent passion of men of Utopian dreams, the ideal 

 (in one kind) of the spoiled children of culture, the 

 knight-errantry of the Renascence — whose imagina- 

 tion soared after illimitable satisfaction, who were 

 avowedly bent upon transforming the brazen of 

 this world into the golden, to whom desire was 

 but the first step to attainment, and failure an un- 

 known experience. 



But even yet some may demur that the interest 

 of the antique garden, as we see it, is due to Nature 

 direct, and not to art-agencies. It is Nature who 

 gives it its artistic qualities of gradation, contrast, 

 play of form and colour, the flicker of sunshine 

 through the foliage, the shadows on the grass — not 



