THE LURE OF THE GARDEN 



grotto, flower-knot, and fountain, and the latter making 

 use of the vernacular with all the liberty of a man at his 

 ease. 



Bacon is among the first who presents us with a prose 

 garden, setting forth his ideas on the subject with 

 that precision and careful squaring of corners, that at- 

 tention to detail so dear to his heart, both the garden and 

 himself being decidedly formal. For even in the wilder- 

 ness, or desert, as he calls it, which he includes, to be 

 sure, being a man of too great a spirit not to realize 

 both its charm and its value, one is conscious of a severe 

 control. He begins by stating the planting of a garden 

 to be the purest of human pleasures and the final product 

 of civilization, and he says furthermore: 



"I do hold it, in the royal ordering of gardens, there 

 ought to be a garden for all the months of the year ; in 

 which, severally, things of beauty may be there in season." 

 After enumerating many shrubs and flowers fit to plant 

 in such a garden, where, " if you will, you may have the 

 Golden Age again, and a spring all the year long," and 

 discoursing delightfully of fragrant blossoms ' ' because 

 the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it 

 comes and goes like the warbling of music) than in the 

 hand," he shapes his garden for you to see. 



"The garden is best to be square, encompassed on all 

 four sides with a stately arched hedge . . . this hedge I 

 intend to be set upon a bank, not steep, but gently slope, 

 of some six foot, set all with flowers ... I would also 



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