AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 



Far less well known than Bacon's essay " Of Gardens," is his 

 ' Sylva Sylvarum" or " Natural Historic in Ten Centuries, "* 

 published after the illustrious author's death. His studies and 

 practical experiments in horticulture are recorded in detail in the- 

 fifth, sixth, and part of the seventh centuries, of this learned work. 

 Nothing was too large and nothing too small to attract and engage 

 the attention of this extraordinary man. Lord Chancellor of 

 England, and occupied with the highest affairs of state, he could 

 yet turn from them at any moment and bring the vast powers of 

 his intellect to the consideration of the method of raising straw- 

 berries, of bringing sun to ripen wall-fruit, of grafting, of water- 

 ing, and to the discussion of the causes of the degeneracy of plants, 

 and of the colours of fruit and flowers ; and, as one of his admirers 

 puts it, " he could descend from the Woolsack to investigate the 

 economy of manure beds." 



As before stated, horticulture made no advance during the 

 Civil War and the Commonwealth, and not until the Restoration 

 was any change in the character of English gardens apparent. 

 Then a new interest was awakened. French gardening had made 

 progress, and Charles II. and his exiled courtiers, had had excep- 

 tional opportunities for studying its methods, and had imbibed 

 a preference for the French manner of laying out pleasure-grounds. 

 With Le Notre and other great gardeners of Louis XIV., spacious- 

 ness was the chief desideratum in gardens ; and these were laid out 

 with mathematical precision, but no great originality of design. 

 And, as Ruskin says, in a passage which, although referring to 

 another art, may with propriety be applied here : " Grandeur 

 depends on proportion and design, not, except in a quite secon- 

 dary degree, on magnitude. Mere size has, indeed, under all 

 disadvantages, some definite value, and so has mere splendour. 

 But even splendour may be purchased at too heavy a cost." Ere 

 long, much of the French character impressed itself upon English 

 gardens, so that before the end of Charles' reign all traces of the 

 mediae valism that had lingered round the gardens of Henry VIII. 

 had vanished. Size and elegance, or what passed for elegance, 

 usurped the place of the picturesqueness and privacy of the gardens 

 of the Tudors ; the galleries, the mount (that, according to Bacon, 

 should properly be thirty feet high, offering a view from its summit 

 over the high walls of the enclosure) had been swept away, and a 



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