236 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND x 



" Bring hither the pinke and purple columbine, 



With gillyflowers. 

 Bring sweet carnations, and sops in wine,^ 



Worne of paramours, 

 Strew me the ground with daffa-down-dillies 

 And cowslips, and king-cups, and loved lilies, 



The pretty pauncc 



And the chevisauncc 

 Shall match with the faire flower de luce."^ 



These and many another fancy, such as 

 EngHsh men and women loved three hundred 

 years ago, might be carried out, not for 

 archaeology, not for ostentation, but because 

 they give real pleasure and delight. This, after 

 all, is the only principle. It is nothing to us 

 that the French did this or the Italians that ; 

 the point is, what has been done in England, 

 what has been loved here, by us and by those 

 before us. The best English tradition has 

 always been on the side of refinement and reserve ; 

 it has loved beauty- — not the obvious beauty of 

 the south, but the charm and tenderness, the 

 inexpressible sweetness of faces that fill the 

 memory like half-remembered music. This is 

 the feeling that one would wish to see realised 

 in the garden again, not the coarse facility 

 that overwhelms with its astonishing cleverness, 

 but the delicate touch of the artist, the finer 

 scholarship which loves the past and holds 

 thereby the key to its meaning. 



^ "Sops in wine" is given by Gerard in his chapter on Clover Gilly- 

 flowers as a variety of that flower. 

 2 Iris. 



