STREET GARDENS. 



167 



monument. If the belt is varied by a few projections or 

 clumps in the inside^ its external continuity is neverthe- 

 less rigidly maintained, and the usual feehng communi- 

 cated to you in passing round a square is that you are 

 walking in the front of a row of houses, but at the back 



I of a garden. The internal arrangements are often little 

 superior to the external, and often they are worst where 

 most might have been expected. We have seen, for 



^ example, a frill of shrubs added to the original belt, and 

 two dull outlines produced instead of one. We have seen 

 parallel terraces which are not parallel in their levels, and 

 curtailed moreover of their fair proportions by an oblique 

 walk slanting across the base. With a varied proprietary 

 and hundreds of overlooking windows, the ruling idea 

 in the laying out of street gardens seems to be their 

 seclusion from the vulgar eyes of passengers on the 

 pa^^ement. The inhabitants of such places not unfre- 

 quently complaui of their exclusion from the parks and 

 gardens of country gentlemen, and this often in entire 

 oblivion of their own equally illiberal and more inconsis- 

 tent exclusiveness in regard to their city paradises. But 

 if street gardens are inferior in design, they are scarcely 

 less so in their management. A directory of worthy 

 citizens, with a jobbing gardener as their executive, often 

 perpetrate great barbarities on the unfortunate shrubs 

 and trees growing under their regike. What with the 

 manifest errors in the laying-out of the grounds, the 

 mutilations inflicted on trees and shrubs in palpable 

 ignorance or contempt of arboreal beauty, the inevitably 

 injmious effects of dust and smoke, — the whole influences, 

 natural and artificial, resulting in a dainty, but puny, 

 rus-in-urbisliness, as it has been expressively called, — we 

 have sometimes been tempted to wish that squares were 



