ITALIAN FREXCH. 13 



magnificence. Two hundred acres and two hundred 

 millions of francs were the materials which Louis 

 XIV. handed over ;to Le Notre, wherewith to con- 

 struct them. To draw petty figures in dwarf-box, 

 and elaborate patterns in particoloured sand, might 

 well be dispensed with where the formal style was 

 carried out with such magnificence as this, but other- 

 wise the designs of Le Notre differ little from that 

 of his predecessors in the Geometric style, save in 

 their monstrous extent. This is the " grand man- 

 ner " of which Batty Langley, in his ' New Prin- 

 ciples of Gardening,' published in 1728, has given 

 such extraordinary specimens. We wish it were 

 only possible for us to transfer a few of his designs 

 to these pages, that the absurdity of that fashion 

 might be fully shown up. Some notion may be 

 formed of his system from his starting with the prin- 

 ciple that the " true end and design of laying out 

 gardens of pleasure is, that we may never know 

 when we have seen the whole." * The great wonder 

 of Versailles was the well-known labyrinth, not such 

 a maze as is really the source of much idle amuse- 

 ment at Hampton Court, but a mere ravel of inter- 

 minable walks, closely fenced in with high hedges, 

 in which thirty-nine of JEsop's Fables were repre- 

 sented by painted copper figures of birds and beasts, 

 each group connected with a separate fountain, and 



* Brown who, though an uneducated man, and alluded to, we 

 suppose, by Sir W. Chambers where he speaks of " peasants emerging 

 from the melon-ground to take the periwig and turn professor,"" left 

 many good sayings behind him used to say of these tortuous walks, 

 that you might put one foot upon zig and the other upon z-tg. 



