X PROLOGUE 



(iii) Hon. Alicia Amherst's 'History of Gardening in 

 England' (1895)— 

 my obligations are none the less great that it is impossible to 

 express them every time they are incurred. 



Finally, to my old friend Francis Henry Cripps-Day for general 

 and generous assistance given me unstintingly in revising the 

 book, as well as for the labour of preparing the Index {non solum 

 verborum, sed amicitice), I am heartily grateful. 



And now a last word of egoistic reverie. Where may one in- 

 dulge in day-dreams, if not in a garden ? My dream is of a Library 

 in a Garden ! In the very centre of the garden away from house 

 or cottage, but united to it by a pleached alley or pergola of vines 

 or roses, an octagonal book-tower like Montaigne's rises upon 

 arches forming an arbour of scented shade. Between the book- 

 shelves, windows at every angle, as in Pliny's Villa library, 

 opening upon a broad gallery supported by pillars of ' faire 

 carpenter's work,' around which cluster flowering creepers, follow 

 the course of the sun in its play upon the landscape. ' Last 

 stage of all,' a glass dome gives gaze upon the stars by 

 night, and the clouds by day : ' les nuages . . . les nuages qui 

 passent ... la bas ... les merveilleux nuages ! ' And in this 

 BIBAIOKHIIOS — this Garden of Books — Sui et Amicorum, would 

 pass the coloured days and the white nights, ' not in quite blank 

 forgetfulness, but in continuous dreaming, only half-veiled by 

 sleep.' 



A. FORBES SIEVEKING. 



12 Seymour Street, Portman Square, 

 November 1899. 



