Preliminaries. 5 



on the barren and interminable moor, in a 

 harsh and precarious climate, with slender 

 opportunities of development within, and 

 the scantiest external communications. Our 

 knowledge of their social organisation is very 

 slight, and is almost entirely drawn from 

 the imperfect testimony of Caesar. But we 

 obtain no insight, from that or any other 

 source, into their mode of preparing such 

 portions of their food as depended on the 

 cultivation of the ground. 



The ancient English garden was, indeed, 

 as widely divergent from those to which our 

 eyes have grown accustomed, as the hanging 

 terraces of Babylon or the Platonic groves of 

 Athens. There was, till the sixteenth century 

 at least, no attempt at artistic arrangement 

 or methodical distribution. The fruit and 

 forest trees seem to have grown side by side ; 

 and the flower-borders and beds would have 

 fallen very short of modern demands, or even 

 of the views of the men who introduced into 

 our country the foreign schools of horticulture. 

 But the fifteenth century saw something like 

 an advance in the direction of separation 



