i6 
LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
made general director of all the buildings and gardens of 
the time. 
“ The gardens of Versailles,” says a tasteful English 
reviewer, u may indeed be taken as the great exemplar of 
this style ; and magnificent indeed they are, if expense 
and extent and variety suffice to make up magnificence. 
To draw petty figures in dwarf-box and elaborate pat- 
terns in parti-colored sand, might well be dispensed with 
where the formal style was carried out on so grand a scale 
as this, but otherwise the designs of Le Notre differ little 
from that of his predecessors in the geometric style, save in 
their monstrous extent. The great wonder of Versailles 
was the well known labyrinth, not such a maze as is really 
the source of so much idle amusement at Hampton Court, 
but a mere ravel of interminable walks, closely fenced in 
with high hedges, in which thirty-nine of iEsop’s fables 
were represented by painted copper figures of birds and 
beasts, each group connected with a separate fountain, and 
all spouting water out of their mouths ! Every tree was 
planted with geometrical exactness, and parterre answered 
to parterre across half a mile of gravel. “ Such symmetry,” 
says Lord Byron, “ is not for solitude ;” and certainly, the 
gardens of Versailles were not planted with any such in- 
tent. The Parisians do not throng there for the contempla- 
tion to be found in the “ trim gardens” of Milton. There 
is indeed a melancholy, but not a pleasing one, in wander- 
ing alone, through those many acres of formal hornbeam, 
when we feel that it requires the “ galliard and clinquant” 
air of a scene of Watteau ; its crowds and love-making — its 
hoops and minuets — a ringing laugh and merry tambourine 
— to make us recognise the real genius of the place. 
Taking Versailles on the gigantic type of the French 
