T. JAMES 281 



gardens of Elizabeth, the pleach-work and intricate flower-borders 

 of James I., the painted Dutch statues and canals of William and 

 Mary, the winding gravel walks, and lake-making of Brown, to 

 poor Shenstone's sentimental farm and the landscape fashion of 

 the present day, — we shall have little reason to pride ourselves on 

 the advance which national taste has made upon the earliest 

 efforts in this department. 



If I am to have a system at all, give me the good old system 

 of terraces and angled walks, and dipt yew-hedges, against whose 

 dark and rich verdure the bright old-fashioned flowers glittered in 

 the sun. 



I love the topiary art, with its trimness and primness, and its 

 open avowal of its artificial character. It repudiates at the first 

 glance the skulking and cowardly ' celare artein ' principle, and, 

 in its vegetable sculpture, is the properest transition from the 

 architecture of the house to the natural beauties of the grove and 

 paddock. 



Who, to whom the elegance, and gentlemanliness, and poetry — 

 the Boccaccio-spirit — of a scene of Watteau is familiar, does not 

 regret the devastation made by tasty innovators upon the grounds 

 laid out in the times of the Jameses and Charleses ? As for old 

 Noll, I am certain, though I have not a jot of evidence, that he 

 cared no more for a garden than for an anthem ; he would as lief 

 have sacrificed the verdant sculpture of a yew-peacock as the 

 time-honoured tracery of a cathedral shrine ; and his crop-eared 

 soldiery would have had as great satisfaction in bivouacking in 

 the parterres of a ' royal pleasaunce ' as in the presence-chamber 

 of a royal palace. It were a sorrow beyond tears to dwell on the 

 destruction of garden-stuff in those king-killing times. Thousands, 

 doubtless, of broad-paced terraces and trim vegetable conceits 

 sunk in the same ruin with their mansions and their masters : and 

 alas ! modern taste has followed in the footsteps of ancient 

 fanaticism. How many old associations have been rooted up 

 with the knotted stumps of yew and hornbeam ! And Oxford, too, 

 in the van of reform ! Beautiful as are St John's Gardens, who 

 would not exchange them for the very walks and alleys along 



