86 THE FLOWER GARDEN. 



flowers glittered in the sun. I love the topiary art, with 

 its trimness and primness, and its open avowal of its arti- 

 ficial character. It repudiates at the first glance the 

 sculking and cowardly " celare artem " principle, and, in 

 its vegetable sculpture, is the properest transition from the 

 architecture of the house to the natural beauties of the 

 grove and paddock. 



Who, to whom the elegance, and gentlemanliness, and 

 poetry, the Boccaccio-spirit of a scene of Watteau is 

 familiar, does not regret the devastation made by tasty 

 innovators upon the grounds laid out in the times of the 

 Jameses and Charleses ? As for old Noll, I am certain, 

 though I have not a jot of evidence, that he cared no more 

 for a garden than for an anthem ; he would as lief have 

 sacrificed the verdant sculpture of a yew-peacock as the 

 time-honoured tracery of a cathedral shrine ; and his crop- 

 eared soldiery would have had as great satisfaction in 

 bivouacking in the parterres of a " royal pleasaunce " as in 

 the presence-chamber of a royal palace. It were a sorrow 

 beyond tears to dwell on the destruction of garden-stuff in 

 those king-killing times. Thousands, doubtless, of broad- 

 paced terraces and trim vegetable conceits sunk in the 

 same ruin with their mansions and their masters : and, alas f 

 modern taste has followed in the footsteps of ancient 

 fanaticism. How many old associations have been rooted 

 up with the knotted stumps of yew and hornbeam ! And 

 Oxford too in the van of reform f Beautiful as are St. 

 John's gardens, who would not exchange them for the very 

 walks and alleys along which Laud, in all the pardonable 

 pride of collegiate lionizing, conducted his illustrious guests 

 Charles and Henrietta? Who does not grieve thp.t we 

 must now inquire in vain for the bowling-green in Christ 

 Church, where Cranmer solaced the weariness of his last 



