92 GARDEN-CRAFT. 



everybody and everything; he " spelt every man 

 backward," as Macaulay observes ; with himself he 

 lived in eminent self-content. 



So too, after quoting Temple's description of the 

 garden at Moor Park with the master's little rhap- 

 sody "the sweetest place I think that I have 

 seen in my life, either before or since, at home or 

 abroad" Walpole has this icy sneer: "Any man 

 might design and build as sweet a garden who 

 had been born in and never stirred out of Holborn. 

 It was not peculiar in Sir William Temple to think 

 in that manner." 



It is not wise, however, to lay too much stress 

 upon criticisms of this sort. After all, any phase of 

 Art does but express the mind of its day, and it 

 cannot do duty for the mind of another time. " The 

 old order changeth, yielding place to new," and to 

 take a critical attitude towards the forms of an older 

 day is almost a necessity of the case ; they soon 

 become curiosities. Yet we may fairly regret the 

 want of tenderness in dealing with these gardens of 

 the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, for, by all the 

 laws of human expression, they should be master- 

 pieces. The ground-chord of the garden-enterprise 

 of those days was struck by Bacon, who rates 

 buildings and palaces, be they never so princely, 

 as " but gross handiworks " where no garden is : 

 " Men come to build stately sooner than to 

 garden finely, as if gardening were the Greater 

 Perfection " the truth of which saying is only too 

 glaringly apparent in the relative conditions of the 



