PIERRE DANIEL HUET 123 



of large broad sand-strewn allies, of trellises, parterres, adorned 

 only with a few delicate beds, defined by strips of box and 

 edged with a few flowers, and a few stunted trees, and in which 

 you can scarce distinguish summer from winter. 



M. le Nostre, who is quoted as the author of this sort of 

 garden, which it is asserted he brought back from Italy, did, 

 it is true, adapt it to the King's Gardens, but he did not adapt 

 it alone, for he added covered alleys, shaped woods, trees of 

 lofty trunk, pallisades, and green shades. The majority of 

 private persons, possessing neither sufficient ground, nor suffi- 

 cient means to give their gardens all these ornaments, and keep 

 them up, have only adopted its parterres, which require little 

 time and expense, but in which walking is out of the question 

 throughout the day, and in which ladies, regardful of their com- 

 plexion, would only venture to appear after sun-set. 



Pere Rapin was not of this way of thinking, and has left very 

 different lessons in his agreeable Poem on gardening; and if 

 Virgil had been able to satisfy the desire he had to handle that 

 subject, he would not have been content to give precepts for 

 cultivating fruit- and kitchen-gardens ; but in imitation of the 

 good old man of Cilicia, whom he had seen at Tarentum, and 

 whose care and industry he describes so agreeably, he would 

 have painted in his verse the pleasures created by tall trees, 

 unfruitful though they may be, by their foliage, their shadows, 

 and their decoration. — Ibid: Of the gardens in fashion. 



(Lord Paulet's garden at Hinton St George is) very different XVI Ith Century, 

 from the common style of English gardens; these are usually 

 walks of sand, made perfectly level, by rolling them with a stone 

 cylinder, through the axis of which a lever of iron is passed whose 

 ends being brought forward and united together in form of a 

 triangle, serve to move it backwards or forwards, and between 

 the walks are smooth grass-plats, covered with the greenest tuft, 

 without any other ornament. This of my Lord Paulet is a 

 Meadow divided into several compartments of brick-work, which 

 are filled with flowers. — Harleian Miscellanies^ vol. vii. p. 141. 



