INTRODUCTION 



The five writers, whose Garden Essays are here 

 presented in whole or abstract Sir William Temple, 

 Abraham Cowley, Sir Thomas Browne, Andrew 

 Marvell and John Evelyn may be said in their lives 

 to cover the whole of the Seventeenth Century (the 

 eldest being born in 1605, the last dying in 1706) ; 

 and in their writings to represent not only some of the 

 best of Garden, but of English, Literature. It would 

 not be easily possible to select five better names to 

 represent either the literature or the lives of great 

 Englishmen. Four out of the five were pre-eminently 

 men and citizens of the world, in the noblest and 

 richest sense ; one, Abraham Cowley, may be chosen as 

 the type of man to whom Retirement and Repose are 

 more congenial than Action. Temple, by his with- 

 drawal from public life at his meridian, stands in this 

 respect midway between Cowley on the one hand, and 

 Browne, Marvell and Evelyn on the other all three 

 of whom strove to the end of their lives with the 



