24 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



than those of his master, kept pace so closely with his 

 fancies, that he received the honor of knighthood, and was 

 made general director of all the buildings and gardens ol 

 the time. 



" The gardens of Versailles," says a tasteful English 

 reviewer, " may mdeed be taken as the great exemplar of 

 this style ; and magnificent indeed they are, if expense 

 and extent and variety suffice to make up magnificence. 

 To draw petty figures in dwarf-box and elaborate pat- 

 terns in parti-colored sand, might well be dispensed with 

 where the formal style was carried out on so grand a scale 

 as this, but otherwise the designs of Le Notre differ little 

 from that of his predecessors in the geometric style, save in 

 their monstrous extent. The great wonder of Versailles 

 was the well known labyrinth, not such a maze as is really 

 the source of so much idle amusement at Hampton Court, 

 but a mere ravel of interminable walks, closely fenced in 

 with high hedges, in which thirty-nine of iEsop's fables 

 were represented by painted copper figures of birds and 

 beasts, each group connected with a separate fountain, and 

 all spouting water out of their mouths ! Every tree was 

 planted with geometrical exactnes.'?, and parterre answered 

 to parterre across half a mile of gravel. ' Such symmetry,' 

 says Lord Byron, ' is not for solitude ;' and certainly, the 

 gardens of Versailles were not planted with any such in- 

 tent. The Parisians do not throng there for the contempla- 

 tion to be found in the ' trim gardens ' of Milton. There 

 is indeed a melancholy, but not a pleasing one, in wander- 

 ng alone, throucfh those manv acres of formal hornbeam, 

 when we feel that it requires the 'galliard and clinquant' 

 air of a scene of Watteau ; its crowds and love-making — its 

 noops and minuets — a ringing laugh and merry tamborine 



