102 GARDEN-CRAFT. 



hands!' The truth will out ! The " dainter sense " 

 of garden-craft has vanished ! According to Walpole, 

 garden-adventure is to be henceforth journeyman's 

 work, and Brown, the immortal kitchen-gardener, 

 leads the way. 



It were unfair to suspect that the exigencies of 

 sprightly writing had carried Walpole beyond the 

 bounds of accuracy in his description of the stiff- 

 garden as he knew it, for things were in some re- 

 spects very bad indeed. At the same time he is so 

 engrossed with his abuse of old ways of gardening, 

 and advocacy of the landscape-gardener's new-fangled 

 notions, that his account of garden-craft generally 

 falls short of completeness. He omits, for instance, 

 to notice the progress in floriculture and horticulture 

 of this time, the acquisitions being made in the or- 

 namental foreign plants to be cultivated in the open 

 ground, the green-house, and the stove. He omits to 

 note that Loudon and Wise stocked our gardens with 

 more than giants, animals, monsters, &c., in yew and 

 box and holly. Because the names of these two 

 worthies occur in this gardening text-book of Wai- 

 pole's, all later essayists signal them out for blame. 

 But Evelyn, who ranks as one of the three of 

 England's great gardeners of old days, has a kindlier 

 word for them. He is dilating upon the advantage 

 to the gardener of the high clipped hedge as a pro- 

 tection for his shrubs and flowers, and goes on to 

 particularise an oblong square, palisadoed with a 

 hornbeam hedge " in that inexhaustible magazine at 

 Brompton Park, cultivated by those two industrious 



