Sir Joshua Fitch's Address 271 



good pictures. For the true poet and the true artist 

 alike are students of Nature. 



The teacher, in his private reading, will note pas- 

 sages from Chaucer and Spenser, from the Elizabethan 

 dramatists down to our own time, which are full of 

 references to natural scenery, and which may serve 

 to illuminate his lessons and invest them with a new 

 charm. The great Lord Verulam, whom posterity 

 insists on calling Lord Bacon, though that was never 

 his proper name, once (I suppose at some leisure 

 moment when he was not engaged in writing the 



o o o 



dramas commonly called Shakespeare's) wrote a 

 charming essay on " Gardens ", beginning with the 

 words: "God Almighty first planted a garden. And 

 " indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the 

 " greatest refreshment to the spirit of man, without 

 " which buildings and palaces are but gross handi- 

 " works." And he goes on to show what are the 

 characteristic and suitable flowers and fruits for each 

 month of the year, and what are the conditions under 

 which a garden may be made most profitable and 

 most delightful. Then there is Adam's morning hymn 

 in Paradise Lost, and hundreds of striking descriptive 

 passages in Izaak Walton, in White's Natural History 

 of Selborne, in Kingsley, Scott, and our best novelists, 

 as well as in later books, such as Darwin's Voyage of 

 tJie Beagle or Mr. Cornish's Studies on the Thames. 

 The teacher, in his own reading, will find it interest- 

 ing to trace the very different ways in which the 

 external face of Nature has appealed to successive 

 writers the love of smooth -shaven lawns and trim 

 gardens which is shown in the more artificial school 

 of Pope and his French contemporaries, the more 



