GLEANINGS ON GARDENS. 



We have innumerable instances of the great poet's 

 attachment to Botany. Whoever painted the violet, 

 the crimson drops ' i' th' bottom of a cow-slip/ and the 

 * winking' mary-buds, with a sweeter pencil than his? 

 The same may be said as to his distribution of the 

 flowers by the pretty Perditta, by Ophelia, those in 

 Cyiribeline, and by Friar Laurence. We have many 

 of his remarks on general Horticulture. One may 

 describe modern or landscape gardening by applying 

 to it those lines of his, when he is speaking of an art 

 which he says ' shares with great creating nature :' viz., 

 the art of grafting the apple on the crab ; for he 

 calls it 



' . . . . an art 



Which does mend nature, change it rather ; but 



The art itself is nature.' 



If my reader smiles at what he may call this 

 trifling, reminding him of * another garden,' let me 

 shelter myself under the unerring authority of Thomas 

 Warton, who, in his History of English Poetry, declares 

 that 'every hovel to which Shakespeare alludes 

 interests curiosity.' 



W, Withers, in his letter to Sir W. Scott, gives 

 the following quotation from the late Nathaniel 

 Kent, and I here insert that quotation merely 

 because Mr. Kent has thus reminded us that Shake- 

 speare was aware of the danger of improper pruning : 



