Part I. 



WHA T TO A VOW. 



73 



them engraved from drawings taken in various gardens, public 

 and private ; but as this course might have proved an invi- 

 dious one, I have preferred to take them from our best books 

 on Horticulture — the works of our highest authorities, Loudon, 

 Macintosh, and others. From these the reader may glean some 

 idea of popular notions on this subject, and it is scarcely needful 

 to add that, if such ridiculous objects occur in our most trust- 

 worthy books, yet more absurd must they be in many gardens. 



The first simple beauty is copied from the frontispiece of 

 a small book on alpine plants, 

 published not many years ago. 

 Growing naturally on the high 

 mountains, unveiled from the 

 sun by wood or copse, alpine 

 plants are grouped here be- 

 neath what appears to be a 

 weeping willow — a position in 

 which they could not possibly 

 attain anything like their na- 

 tive vigour and beauty, or do 

 otherwise than lead a sickly 

 existence. The degree of 

 contentment and delight felt 

 by the artist for his sub- 

 ject is shown by his planting 

 the ponderous vase in the 

 centre of the group, and the introduction of the railing is quite 

 beyond all praise. Had Mr. Ruskin seen it, he might have 

 spoken more kindly of iron railings in the ' Two Paths ' ! * A 



Fig. 45- — Frontispiece of a book on 

 alpine plants. 



* **0n the other hand, we cast our iron into bars — brittle, though an inch thick — 

 sharpen them at the ends, and consider fences, and other work made of such materials, 

 decorative ! 1 do not believe it would be easy to calculate the amount of mischief 

 done to our taste in England by that fence ironwork of ours alone. If it were asked 

 of us, by a single characteristic, to distinguish the dwellings of a country into two 

 broad sections : and to set, on one side, the places where people were, for the most 

 part, simple, happy,- benevolent, and honest; on the other side, the places. where 

 at least a great number of the people were sophisticated, unkind, imcomfortable, and 

 unprincipled, there is, I think, one feature that you could fix upon as a positive test : 

 the uncomfortable and unprincipled parts of a country would be the parts where 

 people lived among iron railings, and the comfortable and principled parts where they 

 had none . . . Consider every other kind of fence or defence, and you will find some 

 virtue in it ; but in the iron railing none ... a thing which you can't walk inside of 

 without making yourself look like a wild beast, nor look out at your window in the 

 morning without expecting to see somebody impaled upon it in the night." 



