8o GARDEN-CRAFT. 



trimmed the hedges of hornbeam, "than which there 

 is nothing more graceful," and the cradle or close-walk 

 with that perplext canopy which lately covered the 

 seat in his Majesty's garden at Hampton Court, and 

 how the tonsile hedges, fifteen or twenty feet high, are 

 to be cut and kept in order " with a scythe of four feet 

 long, and very little falcated ; this is fixed on a long 

 sneed or straight handle, and does wonderfully expedite 

 the trimming of these and the like hedges" 



Thirdly, Bacon's essay tells us all that an 

 English garden can be, or may be. Bacon writes not 

 for his age alone but for all time ; nay, his essay 

 covers so much ground that the legion of after- 

 writers have only to pick up the crumbs that fall 

 from this rich man's table, and to amplify the two 

 hundred and sixty lines of condensed wisdom that it 

 contains. -Its category of effects reaches even the 

 free-and-easy planting of the skirts of our dressed 

 grounds, with flowers and shrubs set in the turf 

 " framed as much as may be to a natural wildness " 

 a pretty trick of compromise which the modern book- 

 writers would have us believe they invented them- 

 selves. 



On one point the modern garden has the ad- 

 vantage and is bound to excel the old, namely in 

 its employment of foreign trees and shrubs. The 

 decorative use of " trees of curiosity," as the foreign 

 trees were then called, and the employment of 

 variegated foliage, was not unknown to the gardener 

 of early days, but it was long before foreign plants 

 were introduced to any great extent. Loudon has 



