AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
Far less well known than Bacon’s essay ‘‘ Of Gardens,” is_his' 
“ Sylva Sylvarum,” or ‘‘ Natural Historie in Ten Centuries,’’ 
published after the illustrious author’s death. His studies and 
practical experiments in horticulture are recorded in detail in the 
fifth, sixth, and part of the seventh centuries, of this learned work. 
Nothing was too large and nothing too small to attract and engage 
the attention of this extraordinary man. Lord Chancellor of 
England, and occupied with the highest affairs of state, he could 
yet turn from them at any moment and bring the vast powers of 
his intellect to the consideration of the method of raising straw- 
berries, of bringing sun to ripen wall-fruit, of grafting, of water- 
ing, and to the discussion of the causes of the degeneracy of plants, 
and of the colours of fruit and flowers ; and, as one of his admirers 
puts it, ‘‘he could descend from the Woolsack to investigate the 
economy of manure beds.” 
As before stated, horticulture made no advance during the 
Civil War and the Commonwealth, and not until the Restoration 
was any change in the character of English gardens apparent. 
Then a new interest was awakened. French gardening had made 
progress, and Charles II. and his exiled courtiers, had had excep- 
tional opportunities for studying its methods, and had imbibed 
a preference for the French manner of laying out pleasure-grounds. 
With Le Notre and other great gardeners of Louis XIV., spacious- 
ness was the chief desideratum in gardens; and these were laid out 
with mathematical precision, but no great originality of design. 
And, as Ruskin says, in a passage which, although referring to 
another art, may with propriety be applied here: ‘‘ Grandeur 
depends on proportion and design, not, except in a quite secon- 
dary degree, on magnitude. Mere size has, indeed, under all 
disadvantages, some definite value, and so has mere splendour. 
But even splendour may be purchased at -too heavy a cost.” Ere 
long, much of the French character impressed itself upon English 
gardens, so that before the end of Charles’ reign all traces of the 
medizvalism that had lingered round the gardens of Henry VIII. 
had vanished. Size and elegance, or what passed for elegance, 
usurped the place of the picturesqueness and privacy of the gardens 
of the Tudors ; the galleries, the mount (that, according to Bacon, 
should properly be thirty feet high, offering a view from its summit 
over the high walls of the enclosure) had been swept away, and a 
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