GARDENS OF THE POETS. 7 



kitchen gardens, divided by flowering shrubs, and 

 green walks, and verdant alleys. It was in such 

 a garden that Spenser's butterfly met its untimely 

 end, and such were 



u The gardens of Adonis, fraught 

 With pleasures manifold." 



It was in the "pleached bower" of such a 

 garden, where the ripe honeysuckles obscured 

 the sun, that Shakespeare's Beatrice was to hide. 

 Of such a garden Andrew Marvell was thinking 

 when he described the lilies and roses, on which 

 Sylvio's fawn was wont to feed. In these old 

 gardens Cowley wrote his essays ; and Herrick 

 gathered the fancies of a poet, or the warnings 

 of a moralist, with his early violets and fading 

 daffodils. 



And so, with but few changes, these Elizabethan 

 gardens grew on from year to year, till a certain 

 modification occurred when William III. intro- 

 duced a taste for whatever was characteristic of 

 Holland : statues were fewer, and hedges of box 

 or yew, clipped into fantastic shapes, became all 



