THE LURE OF THE GARDEN 



pletely satisfies the demand for beauty^without reveal- 

 ing anything of the garden itself. 



The variety of beauty attained both in England and 

 Scotland by modifications of these brick and stone 

 walls with wrought-iron gates is truly wonderful. 

 Sometimes the family arms are sculptured on the pil- 

 lars or the arch, or perhaps an ancient quotation or 

 battle-cry. Sometimes a Gothic touch is given by 

 strange animals that peer down upon the visitor, or by 

 a gate-house whose architecture harmonizes with that 

 of the main building. A French writer in the early 

 years of the nineteenth century insists particularly 

 upon this point, asserting that the chief entrance to the 

 grounds should correspond to the house to which it 

 belongs, should promise it, as it were. Let the gate to 

 a princely place be princely, he says, immense and 

 heavy, or springing into airy arches according as it is 

 a castle or a palace to whose grounds you are being 

 admitted; but to a simple cottage garden the gate 

 should be simple too ; a swinging lattice, a pierced 

 door painted green, or a turnstile between white posts. 



The English castles and abbeys built before the 

 Stuart reigns possessed no such gardens as distinguish 

 the later places. But they owned their closes and trim 

 parterres, within their massive walls and behind great 

 battlemented gate-houses, ivy-buried, turreted, and 

 pierced by low arches. Dunster Castle, built under 

 Henry II, has such an entrance, a fine building of 



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