ROBERT SOUTHEY 235 



was glad when I could leave it. 1 Essay on Landscape Gardening. 

 ( Quarterly Review ', 1828.) 



BUT out of doors as much regard was shown to beauty as to ROBERT 

 utility. Miss Allison and Betsey claimed the little garden 

 in front of the house for themselves. It was in so neglected a 

 state when they took possession that, between children and 

 poultry and stray pigs, not a garden flower was left there to grow 

 wild : and the gravel walk from the gate to the porch was over- 

 grown with weeds and grass, except a path in the middle which 

 had been kept bare by use. On each side of the gate were three 

 yew-trees, at equal distances. In the old days of the Grange they 

 had been squared in three lessening stages, the uppermost taper- 

 ing pyramidally to a point. While the house had been shorn of 

 its honours, the yews remained unshorn ; but when it was once 

 more occupied by a wealthy habitant, and a new gate had been 

 set up and the pillars and their stone balls cleaned from moss 

 and lichen and short ferns, the unfortunate evergreens were again 

 reduced to the formal shape in which Mr Allison and his sister 

 remembered them in their childhood. 



This was with them a matter of feeling, which is a better thing 

 than taste. And indeed the yews must either have been trimmed, 

 or cut down, because they intercepted sunshine from the garden, 

 and the prospect from the upper windows. The garden would 

 have been better without them, for they were bad neighbours : 

 but they belonged to old times, aud it would have seemed a sort 

 of sacrilege to destroy them. 



Flower-beds used, like beds in the kitchen-garden, to be raised 

 a little above the path, with nothing to divide them from it, till 

 about the beginning of the seventeenth century ; the fashion of 

 bordering them was introduced either by the Italians or the 

 French. Daisies, periwinkles, feverfew, hyssop, lavender, rose- 

 mary, rue, sage, wormwood, camomile, thyme, and box were used 

 for this purpose : a German horticulturist observes that hyssop 

 1 See Note on page 234. 



