MASTERS AND MEN 273 



think of the late Mr. Ingram of the Belvoir Castle 

 gardens, with regret as for a personal Mend, and also 

 as of one who was a true garden artist. 



But most people who have fair-sized gardens have 

 to do with the middle class of gardener, the man of 

 narrow mental training. The master who, after a good 

 many years of active life, is looking forward to settling 

 in his home and improving and enjoying his garden, 

 has had so different a training, a course of teaching so 

 immeasurably wider and more enlightening. As a boy 

 he was in a great public school, where, by wholesome 

 friction with his fellows, he had any petty or personal 

 nonsense knocked out of him while stUl in his early 

 "teens." Then he goes to college, and whether stu- 

 diously inclined or not, he is already in the great 

 world, always widening his ideas and experience. Then 

 perhaps he is in one of the active professions, or 

 engaged in scientific or intellectual research, or in 

 diplomacy, his ever-expanding intelligence rubbing up 

 against all that is most enlightened and astute in men, 

 or most profoundly inexplicable in matter. He may 

 be at the same time cultivating his taste for literature 

 and the fine arts, searching the libraries and galleries 

 of the civilised world for the noblest and most divinely- 

 inspired examples of human work; seeing with an 

 eye that daily grows more keenly searching, and re- 

 ceiving and holding with a bjain that ever gains a 

 firmer grasp, and so acquires some measure of the 

 higher critical faculty. He sees the ruined gardens of 



