CHAPTER IX. 



IN PRAISE OF BOTH. 



"In small proportions we just beauties see, 

 And in short measures life may perfect be." BEN JONSON. 



" The Common all men have." GEORGE HERBERT. 



WHAT shall we say, then, to the two conflicting 

 views of garden-craft referred to in my last chapter, 

 wherein I take the modern position, namely, that 

 the love of Art in a garden, and the love of wild 

 things in Nature's large estate, cannot co-exist in the 

 same breast ? Is the position true or false ? 



To see the matter in its full bearings I must 

 fetch back a little, and recall what was said in a 

 former chapter (p. 85) upon the differing attitudes 

 towards Nature taken by the earlier and later schools 

 of gardening. There is, I said, no trace in the 

 writings, or in the gardening, of the earlier traditional 

 school, of that mawkish sentiment about Nature, that 

 condescending tenderness for her primal shapes, 

 that has nursed the scruples, and embarrassed the 

 efforts of the " landscape-gardener " from Kent's and 

 Brown's days to now. 



The older gardener had no half-and-half methods ; 

 he made no pretence of Nature-worship, nursed no 



