246 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



any poet, to Sammarthanus or to Sannazarius himself. His 

 cadences are generally very gratifying to the ear, and in this 

 respect he is much above Vida. But his subject or his genius, 

 has prevented him from rising very high ; he is the poet of 

 Gardens, and what Gardens are to nature, that is he to mightier 

 poets. There is also too monotonous a repetition of nearly the 

 same images, as in his long enumeration of flowers in the first 

 book ; the descriptions are separately good, and great artifice is 

 shown in varying them ; but the variety could not be sufficient to 

 vary the general sameness that belongs to an horticultural cata- 

 logue. Rapin was a great admirer of box and all topiary works, 

 or trees cut into artificial forms. 



The first book of the Gardens of Rapin is on flowers, the second 

 on trees, the third on waters, and the fourth on fruits. The poem 

 is of about 3000 lines, sustained with equable dignity. All kinds 

 of graceful associations are mingled with the description of his 

 flowers, in the fanciful style of Ovid and Darwin ; the violet is 

 lanthis, who lurked in valleys to shun the love of Apollo, and 

 stained her face with purple to preserve her chastity : the rose is 

 Rhodanthe, proud of her beauty, and worshipped by the people 

 in the place of Diana, but changed by the indignant Apollo to a 

 tree, while the populace, who had adored her, are converted into 

 her thorns, and her chief lovers into snails and butterflies. A 

 tendency to conceit is perceived in Rapin, as in the two poets to 

 whom we have just compared him. Thus, in some pretty lines, 

 he supposes Nature to have * tried her prentice hand ' in making 

 a convolvulus, before she ventured upon a lily. 



In Rapin there will generally be remarked a certain redundancy, 

 which fastidious critics might call tautology of expression. But 

 this is not uncommon in Virgil. The Georgics have rarely been 

 more happily imitated, especially in their didactic parts, than by 

 Rapin in the Gardens ; but he has not the high flights of his 

 prototype : his digressions are short and belong closely to the 

 subject j we have no plague, no civil war, no Eurydice. If he 

 praises Louis XIV., it is more as the Founder of the Garden of 

 Versailles, than as the conqueror of Flanders, though his con- 



