Then, walking beneath his tower, he espies the maiden and thus 

 apostrophizes her : 



" Ah sweet ! are ye a worldly creature 

 Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature ? 



" Or are ye God Cupides own princess 

 And coniin are to loose me out of band ? 

 Or are ye very Nature the goddess 

 That have depainted with yr heavenly hand 

 This garden full of flowers as they stand ? " 



The mediaeval " arbour " here referred to, according to W. C. 

 Hazlitt, was not a summer-house as we understand it, but a 

 garden within a garden, sufficiently large to enclose great trees. 

 He quotes in support of this statement the ancient rhyme : 



" And in the garden, as I wccne 

 Was an arbour fair and grecne ; 

 And in the arbour was a tree. 

 A fairer in the world might never be." 



In the King's poem before quoted, however, the word " arbour " 

 is so used as to convey much of its present meaning a meaning 

 which it had indisputably acquired at the beginning of the 

 sixteenth century. 



So early as the first century after Christ the English climate had 

 been eulogized by Tacitus as favourable to the cultivation of all 

 vegetables and fruits except the vine and the olive. Therefore, 

 it is not surprising to find that melons, cucumbers, and many of 

 the more expensive products of the kitchen garden were common 

 in England as early as the reign of Edward III. But the Wars 

 of the Roses interrupted agriculture, and these vegetables after- 

 wards were unknown, until the reign of Henry VIII., when the 

 art of gardening came to a new birth. 



There was for some time a curious prejudice against hops, and 

 in the reign of Henry VI. Parliament was petitioned against the 

 " wicked weed." But in 1576 Reginald Scott published a pamphlet 

 entitled, " The Perfect Platform of a Hoppe Garden." 



Potatoes were not in common use before the middle of the 

 seventeenth century. A writer in the " Topographical Antiquities 

 of Great Britain and Ireland " in 1753, though himself of opinion 

 that Sir Walter Raleigh brought them over, remarks that " the- 



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