GARDEN DESIGN— COMPARATIVE, HISTORICAL, AND ETHICAL. 875 



where we may unbend from the former autocratic austerities and make a 

 transfer from despotism to patriotism. The latter is perhaps the more 

 arduous, yet works from happier motives. In contemplation of the 

 Greek civilization we may escape from the fearful awe of the Egyptian 

 and Babylonian idolatries, and may leave our own ordinary menial and 

 mercenary age, and ponder their pleasing and amusing reveries or legends, 

 as we see them projected upon the screen of their poetic minds, and pursue 

 them in their own imaginative Elysian fields and groves of Arcady. The 

 legends were serious enough to them ; they were their sacred writ, and it 

 must be candidly admitted that some of the myths were shrewd guesses at 

 truth. 



If power and splendour be the objective, I have no doubt that both the 

 Babylonian and Egyptian are superior to the Grecian and Roman, the 

 latter being more and more decadent. " Thou 0 King," was said of 

 Nebuchadnezzar, " art that head of gold," the Medo-Persian dynasty the 

 breast of baser silver, the Grecian the thighs of bronze or brass, and the 

 Roman Empire the feet, part of the iron of imperialism and part of the 

 miry clay of democracy, which will never mix. But we are viewing 

 history from the gardener's standpoint, and our keynote in the garden is 

 rest amidst orderly freedom, and certainly the Grecian type of civilization 

 appeals to our tastes more than its Egyptian and Babylonian prede- 

 cessors, and is more inclinable towards our model. 



It is instructive from an horticulturist's standpoint to note how the 

 blend of the extremely hardy nomad Scythian races and the enduring 

 Spartans, with the refined cultured Athenian races, combined to make 

 the Greeks what they are famed for. It is the same principle in which 

 we set about to improve the species of, say, a blackberry. We take 

 the largest and most luscious produce of culture, and unite it with the 

 hardiest Siberian product that has thriven for generations under the most 

 arduous conditions, and the result is ne phis ultra for its time at least. 

 The Medo-Persian race were similarly a blend of the hardy hill-dwelling 

 Persians grafted on the Median stock, "the hardy scion and the baser 

 stock." What is true of races is true of individuals, to wit Cyrus 

 of kingly stock, but peasant-bred, and William the Conqueror, the son of 

 the tanner's daughter of Falaise. 



When I sat down to make the study of Grecian gardens I propounded 

 to myself a problem something after the following : Given such a rarely 

 blended race, nimble and strong in mind and body ; seeking and pre- 

 senting in their unsurpassed sculptures the perfection of the human form ; 

 dwelling in perhaps the most romantic country in Europe (not the most 

 productive) ; who could perfect a language replete with the finest of 

 inflexions ; their architecture of incomparable proportions and fitness ; 

 the pioneers of modern science, building up all from the barest elements 

 of logical deduction as we see in the books of Euclid : what, I conjectured, 

 must their gardens have been ? I must confess that either from in- 

 sufficient data, or from my failure to enter into the spirit of the always 

 arduous, strenuous Greek view of life, I was disappointed with the answer. 

 There is little or nothing we can store in the way of the rest to which a 

 true garden ministers, and which in fact is the very soul of a garden, 

 being the keynote of the ideal Eden, "that delicious Paradise," where 



