14 THE FLOWER GARDEN. 



all spouting water out of their mouths. A more dull 

 and fatuous notion it never entered into the mind of 

 bloated extravagance to conceive.* 



Every tree was here planted with geometrical 

 exactness, parterre answered to parterre across 

 half a mile of gravel, 



" Grove nods to grove, each alley has its brother, 

 And half the garden just reflects the other." 



" Such symmetry," says Lord Byron, " is not for 

 solitude ;" and certainly the gardens of Versailles 

 were not planted with any such intent. The Pari- 

 sians do not throng there for the contemplation to be 

 found in the " trim gardens " of Milton. There is 

 indeed a melancholy, but not a pleasing one, in 

 wandering alone through those many acres of formal 

 hornbeam, where we feel that it requires the gal- 

 liard and clinquant air of a scene of Watteau its 

 crowds and love-making its hoops and minuets a 

 ringing laugh and merry tambourine to make us 

 recognise the real genius of the place. Taking 

 Versailles as the gigantic type of the French school, 

 it need scarcely be said that it embraces broad gra- 



* Some idea may be formed of the more than childishness of the 

 thing from a contemporary account : " These waterworks represent 

 several of ^Esop's Fables : the animals are all of brass, and painted in 

 their proper colours ; and are so well assigned, that they seem to be 

 in the very action the Fable supposes them in, and the more so, for 

 that they cast water out of their mouths, alluding to the form of 

 speech the Fable renders them in." Here follows the description of 

 a particular fountain. " Fable XIII. The Fox and the Crane. Upon 

 a rock stands a Fox with the Crane ; the Fox is lapping somewhat on 

 a flat gilded dish, the water spreads itself in the form of a table- 

 cloth ; the Crane by way of complaint spouts up water into the air :" 

 and so on through thirty-eight others. Versailles Illustrated, 1726. 



