GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



house lay sleeping in the sunshine, and the place wore the same air 

 of " profound seclusion " that Sir Walter Scott remarks upon in 

 his diary in 1829. Then, after an afternoon at Chiswick House, 

 on the occasion of a fete given by the Duke of Devonshire to which 

 I have elsewhere referred, he spent a night at Holland House, 

 where his works were so much appreciated that, when the " Tales of 

 my Landlord " appeared, his lordship remarked to the publisher, 

 Murray, who had asked him whether he liked them : " Like them ! 

 Why we sat up all night to read them, and nothing slept but my 

 gout ! " 



But the Wizard of the North himself, had he waved his magical 

 wand, could not, by his own unaided art, have summoned up for 

 us a complete picture of the scene that met his eyes when he drew 

 up his blinds and looked out next morning. It is here that painting 

 steps in. For the things that make the chief charm of a garden are 

 not to be described in words, and they are not even hinted at in 

 black and white. Only colour and form in partnership, can give to 

 others a true and vivid image of the appearance of things as we 

 ourselves remember them, at a moment when they are not before 

 the eye ; and colour is too elusive, too dependent on such accidents 

 as the sun's position, and the season of the year, and form is too 

 subtle and abstract, to be explained by words only. Words can 

 tell us no more of the splendour and character of last night's sunset 

 than that it was stormy, or calm ; crimson fusing with gold, gold 

 melting into tender green and so on through the entire chromatic 

 scale of colour. They cannot show us the shapes of things, unless 

 by the cumbrous and incomplete method of analogy and compari- 

 son ; nor demonstrate in what manner the fleecy cloudlets, that 

 high up in the ether, catch the last rosy glow from the setting sun- 

 differ so greatly in bulk and character, from the grand, rolling, 

 heaped-up masses of vapour, that, nearer the horizon, are slowly 

 sailing before a gentle summer's breeze as I write. For what should 

 the factory hand, or the Board- school child, brought up in a City 

 alley where they really never see the sky (though both may have 

 passed the seventh standard) know, practically, of the meaning 

 of cirrus and cumulus ? 



Nor can words describe a rose or a lily to one who has never 

 seen either, by merely saying : " It is red " or " white," without 

 telling him whether it is touched with its complementary blue, or 



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