EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON 263 



from their native soil, torn away from their climate and forced to 

 submit to the grotesque caprices of the shears and line ; in a 

 word natural order everywhere contradicted, inverted, upset, 

 destroyed. In the other, on the contrary, all obeys an unchange- 

 able law ; in all a God seems to dwell. Drops of water follow 

 their course and form rivers, which will form seas : seeds choose 

 their soil and produce a forest. The very bramble is beautiful 

 there. Again we ask, where is the order ? 



Choose, then, between the masterpiece of gardening and the 

 work of nature; between what is conventionally beautiful, and 

 what is beautiful without rule ; between an artificial literature, 

 and an original poesy! — Preface to ' Odes and Ballads^ (1826). 



VFOTHING more stamps the true Cockney than his hate for the EDWARD 

 ^^ sound of Bow bells. It is in vain that we squirearchs affect BULWER, 

 to sneer at the rural tastes of the cit in his rood of ground by the lytTON^ 

 high-road to Hampstead ; the aquarium stored with minnows {i8o3-i873)« 

 and tittle-bats ; the rock work of vitrified clinkers, rich with ferns 

 borne from Wales and the Highlands. His taste is not without 

 knowledge. He may tell us secrets in horticulture that would 

 startle our Scotch gardener; and if ever he be rich and bold 

 enough to have a farm, the chances are that he will teach more 

 than he learns from the knowing ones who bet five to one on 

 his ruin. And when these fameless students of Nature ramble 

 forth from the suburb, and get for a while to the real heart of the 

 country — when, on rare summer holidays they recline, in remoto 

 grami?te, — they need no choice Falernian, no unguents and brief- 



^ 'This place of Lord Lytton's (Knebworth) stands well on a hill in the 

 pretty part of Hertfordshire. It is a house originally of Henry VII. 's reign, 

 and has been elaborately restored. The grounds, too, are very elaborate, and 

 full of statues, kiosks, and knick-knacks of every kind. . . . But, like Lord 

 Lytton himself, the place is a strange mixture of what is really romantic and 

 interesting with what is tawdry, and gimcracky ; and one is constantly coming 

 upon stucco for stone, and bits in the taste of a second-rate Vauxhall stuck 

 down in a beautiful recess of garden.' — Matthew Arnold: Letter to his 

 Mother, May 12, 1869. 



