42 ON THE PROGRESS AND PRINCIPLES OF ORNAMENTAL GARDENING. 



wrong, and is speaking from a mere instinct or impulse, and not from a rea- 

 soning process ; the fact being that either of those opposite styles is capable of 

 producing an equal degree of positive beauty. 



It is my object here to note down briefly, but in order as regular as space 

 will admit, a few of the general principles which ought to govern ornamental 

 gardening under various circumstances, particularly such as are applicable to 

 every-day practice, and which have been suggested to me at different periods in 

 rambling through some of the most beautiful gardens of Europe. 



We can know but little of the style of gardening that prevailed in the earlier 

 ages of the world, but doubtless in every age of high civilisation men were found 

 to apply true principles to every art, and beauty was produced in gardens as 

 perfect as in other works of art (of which the monuments still remain to attest 

 their magnificence) and beauty, perhaps of a novel and singular character, of 

 which we can form no idea, unless better acquainted with the details of the 

 civilisation which called up those combinations of earth and trees and flowers 

 into their beautiful existence. 



The earliest period at which we can form a tolerably correct idea of the 

 style of gardens in use among the ancients, is that of the Roman empire, when 

 the minute descriptions of Pliny and other writers leave little to the curious to 

 desire ; but in this case no extraordinary novelty rewards the research, for from 

 these records it would appear, that a pleasure garden or villa, at Tusculum, 

 among the hills that gird the Campagna, or plain, in the centre of which 

 stands the " eternal city," was much the same thing in the days of Pliny as the 

 villa of a Roman noble of the present day ; and those who have wandered among 

 those hills (the favourite site for the villas of the modern as well as ancient 

 Romans), and compared the ruins of the gorgeous gardens of the artist * 

 emperor Hadrian, with those of the neighbouring villas of Este, of the Bor- 

 ghese, or Chigi, created within the last two centuries, will acknowledge that the 

 same principles of arrangement, the terraces, fountains, statues, temples, &c, 

 pervade both. 



A still stronger proof of the similarity of the gardening taste of ancient and 

 modern Italy I noticed upon the painted walls of the houses of Pompeii (those 

 singular memoirs of the lives and customs of the people of a Roman provincial 

 town eighteen centuries ago), where there is a painting, still in perfect preservation, 

 which might pass as well for the representation of a garden in the reign of the 

 present Pope Gregory XVI. as in that of Augustus, which it accurately repre- 

 sents. 



* The Emperor Hadrian spent many years in embellishing, from his own plans, his villa at Tivoli, with 

 imitations of the most remarkable objects he had seen in his travels in Greece, Egypt, Syria, &c. &c. He had 

 his vale of Tempe, his Egyptian tomb, and many of the most striking features of the then civilised world reduced 

 to the scale of his celebrated villa. Several public buildings in Rome were also erected after his design ; in short, 

 the arts occupied as much of his time as the empire. 



