72 GARDEN-CRAFT. 



the first is not known anywhere else, which leaves 

 all their dry walks in other countries very unpleasant 

 and uneasy ; the other cannot be found in France or 

 in Holland as we have it, the soil not admitting that 

 fineness of blade in Holland, nor the sun that green- 

 ness in France during most of the summer." And 

 following upon this is a long essay upon the orna- 

 mental disposition of the grounds in an English 

 garden and the culture of fruit trees. " I will not 

 enter upon any account of flowers," he says, " having 

 only pleased myself with the care, which is more 

 the ladies' part than the men's,* but the success is 

 wholly in the gardener." 



And Bacon is not so wholly enamoured of Arca- 

 dia and with the embodiment of far-brought fancies 

 in his "prince-like" garden as to be callous of 



* This remark of Temple's as to the small importance the flower-beds 

 had in the mind of the gardener of his day, is significant : as indicating 

 the different methods employed by the ancient and modern gardener. 

 It was not that he was not "pleased with the care" of flowers, 

 but that these were not his chiefest care ; his prime idea was to get 

 broad, massive, well-defined effects in his garden generally. Hence 

 the monumental style of the old-fashioned garden, the carefully-dis- 

 posed ground, the formality, the well-considered poise and counter- 

 poise, the varying levels and well-defined parts. And only inwoven, 

 as it were, into the argument of the piece, are its pretty parts, used 

 much as the jewellery of a fair woman. I should be sorry to be so 

 unjust to the modern landscape gardener as to accuse him of caring 

 over-much for flowers, but of his garden-device generally one may 

 fairly say it has no monumental style, no ordered shape other than its 

 carefully-schemed disorder. It is not a masculine affair, but effemi- 

 nate and niggling ; a little park-scenery, curved shrubberies, wriggling 

 paths, emphasised specimen plants, and flower-beds of more or less 

 inane shape tumbled down on the skirts of the lawn or drive, that do 

 more harm than good to the effect of the place, seen near or at 

 a distance. How true it is that to believe in Art one must be an 

 artist ! 



