The Ancient and Modern Ar ( 



that our ancestors evidently drew a clear 

 distinction between the garden and the 

 arbour not our modern summer-house, but 

 an inner enclosure so called. This point has 

 already received attention in the notes to 

 Warton's Poetry. But the few lines there 

 extracted from an old metrical tale may be 

 worth their room here : 



" And in the garden, as I ween, 

 Was an arbour, fair and green ; 

 And in the arbour was a tree, 

 A fairer in the world might never be." 



The curious circumstance, after all, how- 

 ever, is not that the early Englishman should 

 have had an inner garden called an arbour, 

 but that he should make it a receptacle for 

 forest-trees, and, as we presently learn, that 

 the heroine had an arbour in which her dwell- 

 ing lay a building, too, of some pretension, 

 according to the story. Therefore, whereas 

 now the arbour forms part of the garden, it 

 anciently seems to have been the ornamental 

 ground which surrounded the house, and if 

 it be derived from herba, it was perhaps in 

 grass, with walks interspersed. 



