GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
house lay sleeping in the sunshine, and the place wore the same air 
of “ profound seclusion” that Sir Walter Scott remarks upon in 
his diary in 1829. Then, after an afternoon at Chiswick House, 
on the occasion of a féte given by the Duke of Devonshire to which 
I have elsewhere referred, he spent a night at Holland House, 
where his works were so much appreciated that, when the “ Tales of 
my Landlord ” appeared, his lordship remarked to the publisher, 
Murray, who had asked him whether he likedthem: “ Like them! 
Why we sat up all night to read them, and nothing slept but my 
gout!” 
But the Wizard of the North himself, had he waved his magical 
wand, could not, by his own unaided art, have summoned up for 
us a complete picture of the scene that met his eyes when he drew 
up his blinds and looked out next morning. It is here that painting 
steps in. For the things that make the chief charm of a garden are 
not to be described in words, and they are not even hinted at in 
black and white. Only colour and form in partnership, can give to 
others a true and vivid image of the appearance of things as we 
ourselves remember them, at a moment when they are not before 
the eye; and colour is too elusive, too dependent on such accidents 
as the sun’s position, and the season of the year, and form is too 
subtle and abstract, to be explained by words only. Words can 
tell us no more of the splendour and character of last night’s sunset 
than that it was stormy, or calm; crimson fusing with gold, gold 
melting into tender green—and so on through the entire chromatic 
scale of colour. They cannot show us the shapes of things, unless 
by the cumbrous and incomplete method of analogy and compari- 
son; nor demonstrate in what manner the fleecy cloudlets, that 
high up in the ether, catch the last rosy glow from the setting sun— 
differ so greatly in bulk and character, from the grand, rolling, 
heaped-up masses of vapour, that, nearer the horizon, are slowly 
sailing before a gentle summer’s breeze as I write. For what should 
the factory hand, or the Board-school child, brought up in a City 
alley--where they really never see the sky—(though both may have 
passed the seventh standard)—know, arte of the meaning 
of cirrus and cumulus ? 
Nor can words describe a rose ora “Tiy to one who has never 
seen either, by merely saying: ‘‘ It is red” ‘“* white,”? without 
tellmg him whether it is touched with its ne eee blue, or 
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