THE HISTORY OF GARDEN-MAKING 



methods, and no idea of leaving Nature to work her will unassisted 

 by human ingenuity. 



It can be imagined that the introduction of Italian devices into a 

 country which possessed already a sufficiently definite conviction 

 about the principles of garden-making did not cause a mere destruc- 

 tion of a system which had been followed probably for some 

 centuries. What resulted was rather in the nature of a compromise : 

 new ideas were acquired from Italy, but in working out these ideas 

 much that had served well the designers in the past was retained. 

 At first the novelty of the Italian style gave it an amount of popu- 

 larity which promised to make it all-pervading, and even its more 

 extravagant peculiarities were generally adopted ; as time went on, 

 however, many of these extravagances were corrected, and by the 

 welding together of the new methods and the old, a better way was 

 found of satisfying the English taste. The Italian sumptuousness 

 was accepted, but the quaintness of the mediaeval work and its 

 homeliness of manner were allowed to modify this sumptuousness 

 into something not unduly artificial, and not excessively unnatural. 

 The full effects of this alliance were not seen until the seventeenth 

 century. During the sixteenth the Renaissance garden, the Roman 

 type revived, was made fashionable by the preference shown for it 

 by Henry VIII., who not only employed Italians to lay out the 

 grounds of his palace of Nonsuch, in Surrey, commenced in 1539, 

 but also, in 1530, brought many Italian features into the gardens at 

 Hampton Court, which had been treated by Wolsey in the mediaeval 

 English manner. One of the most notable gardens of this period 

 was that at Theobald's, for Lord Burleigh. It was begun in 1560, 

 and from the description of it, written by the German traveller, 

 Hentzner, who published in 1 598 an account of his visit to England, 

 it seems to have been designed quite closely on the Italian lines. 

 " Close to the palace," he writes, " is a garden surrounded on all 

 sides by water, so that anyone in a boat may wander to and fro 

 among the fruit-groves with great pleasure to himself. There you 

 will find various trees and herbs, labyrinths made with great pains, 

 a fountain of springing water, of white marble ; columns, too, and 

 pyramids placed about the garden some of wood, some of stone. 

 We were afterwards taken to the garden-house by the gardener, and 

 saw in the ground floor, which is circular in shape, twelve figures of 

 Roman Emperors in white marble, and a table of Lydian stone." 

 And further on he mentions a banqueting-room adjoining this 

 garden-house and connected with it by a little bridge. 

 There is proof enough in such records that sixteenth-century 



