96 GARDEN-CRAFT. 



the master who besrot the thin^, for has he not been 

 dead, and his vacant orbits choked with clay these 

 two hundred years and more ! To him, of course, 

 may be ascribed the primal thought of the place, 

 and, say, some fifty }-ears of active participation in 

 its ordering and culture, but for the rest — for its 

 poetic excitement, for its yearly accesses of beauty — 

 are they not to be credited in full to the lenience of 

 Time and the generous operations of Nature ? 



Grant all that should rightly be granted to the 

 disaffected grumbler, and yet, in Mr Lowell's words 

 for another, yet a parallel case, I plead that " Poets 

 are always entitled to a royalty on whatever we 

 find in their works ; for these fine creations as truly 

 build themselves up in the brain as they are built up 

 with deliberate thought." If a garden owed none of 

 its characteristics to its maker, if it had not expressed 

 the mind of its designer, why the essential differences 

 of the garden of this style and of that ! Properly 

 speaking, the music of all gardens is framed out of 

 the same simple gamut of Nature's notes — it is but 

 one music poured from myriad lips — yet out of the 

 use of the same raw elements what a variety of tunes 

 can be made, each tune complete in itself! And it 

 is because we may identify the maker in his work ; 

 because, like the unfinished air, abruptly brought to 

 a close at the master's death, the place is much as it 

 was first schemed, one is jealous for the honour of 

 the man whose eye prophesied its ultimate magic 

 even as he initiated its plan, and drafted its lines. 



Many an English house has been hopelessly 



