European and Japanese Gardens 
eighteenth centuries. It is evident that the love of nature, as 
nature, for its own sake, is a purely modern sentiment, due in 
large measure to the influence of the poets of the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries. The ancients regarded nature as a 
servant, not a mistress, and indulged little sentiment for nature 
in the abstract. The same is largely true of the Renaissance 
gardeners. They did not seek to counterfeit the meadows and 
forests, the hills and vales of wild nature or to bring trees and 
shrubs and topography into any semblance of the picturesque 
and accidental combinations of a natural landscape. Their 
gardens, and preeminently those of Italy, were each designed 
as a decorative setting to the palace or villa, or as pleasure- 
grounds in which what was most pleasing was the human ele¬ 
ment—the evidence of design, symmetry, order, balance, con¬ 
trast, ornament; not the aspect of natural growth, but the 
evidence of nature subdued to human control. 
II. 
The steps by which the Renaissance garden, based upon 
these suggestions, reached final form, I have been unable to 
trace. No very early example remains to us, at least in the 
shape in which it was designed. With the progress of the art 
and changes in taste the earlier gardens must have all been made 
over, for a garden is not, like a building, a finality when once fin¬ 
ished. It changes from season to season, and the growth and 
decay of its vegetation alike alter its pristine aspect. We 
know, however, that before the close of the fifteenth century 
the gardens of Naples were celebrated for their beauty, for 
Charles VIII, of France, writing in 1495 to Pierre de Bourbon, 
waxes eloquent in praise of those which had come into his pos¬ 
session in that city. But it was not till about 1540 that any 
garden received the form in which we know it to-day, even in 
its general features. The classical tendencies of architecture 
and decoration had by this time reached their highest and finest 
development in the works of men like Peruzzi, Antonio da San 
Gallo the Younger, Vignola, Giulio Romano, Pirro Ligorio, and 
others. The influence of the taste of Bramante and Raphael 
was still potent, and the extravagances of the Baroque style 
were still in the future. The papal court had then reached its 
greatest splendor, and Roman society had begun to be domi- 
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