HORACE WALPOLE 175 



coat, were but the childish endeavours of fashion and novelty 

 to reconcile greatness to what it had surfeited on. 



To crown these impotent displays of false taste, the sheers were 

 applied to the lovely wildness of form with which nature has dis- 

 tinguished each various species of tree and shrub. 



The venerable oak, the romantic beech, the useful elm, even 

 the aspiring circuit of the lime, the regular round of the chesnut, 

 and the almost moulded orange-tree, were corrected by such 

 fantastic admirers of symmetry. The compass and square were 

 of more use in plantations than the nursery-man. The measured 

 walk, the quincunx, and the etoile imposed their unsatisfying 

 sameness on every royal and noble garden. Trees were headed, 

 and their sides pared away; many French groves seem green 

 chests set upon poles. Seats of i^rrble, arbours and summer- 

 houses terminated every visto; and symmetry, even where the 

 space was too large to permit its being remarked at one view, 

 was so essential, that, as Pope observed : 



' . . . Each alley has a brother, 

 And half the garden just reflects the other.' 



Knots of flowers were more defensibly subjected to the same 

 regularity. Leisure, as Milton expressed it, 



' In trim gardens took his pleasure.' 



In the garden of Marshal de Biron at Paris, consisting of fourteen 

 acres, every walk is buttoned on each side by lines of flower-pots 

 which succeed in their seasons. When I saw it, there were nine 

 thousand pots of Asters, or la Reine Marguerite. 



We do not precisely know what our ancesters meant by a 

 bower, it was probably an arbour ; sometimes it meant the whole 

 frittered enclosure, and in one instance it certainly included a 

 labyrinth. Rosamund's bower was indisputably of that kind, 

 though whether composed of walls or hedges we cannot determine. 

 A square and a round labyrinth were so capital ingredients of a 

 garden formerly, that in Du Cerceau's architecture, who lived in 

 the time of Charles IX. and Henry III., there is scarce a ground 

 plot without one of each. The enchantment of antique appellations 



