284 LONDON PARKS 6? GARDENS 
Bacon took the Garden in hand, some ten years after 
he became a Bencher. In the accounts of that year 
15 s * 4-d* appears “ due to Mr. Bacon for planting 
of trees in the walkes.” In 1598 it was resolved to 
“ supply more yonge elme trees in the places of such as 
are decayed, and that a new Rayle and quicksett hedge 
be sett upon the upper long walke at the good discretion 
of Mr. Bacon, and Mr. Wilbraham, soe that the charges 
thereof doe not exceed the sum of seventy pounds.” On 
29th April 1600, £60. 6s. 8d. was paid to “Mr. Bacon 
for money disbursed about garnishing of the walkes.” 
Bacon’s own ideas of what a garden should be 
are so delightfully set forth in his essay on gardens, 
that the whole as it left his hand is not difficult to 
imagine. The fair alleys, the great hedge, were 
essentials, and the green, “ because nothing is more 
pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn.” 
His list of plants which bloom in all the months of 
the year was compiled of those specially suited “ for 
the Climate of London,” so no doubt some would 
be included in this Garden under his eye, although 
they do not appear in the records. He wished “ also 
in the very middle a fair mount,” and even this desire 
he carried out in Gray’s Inn. In a description of the 
Garden as late as 1761, a summer-house which Bacon 
put up in 1609 to the memory of his friend Jeremiah 
Bettenham is mentioned as only recently destroyed. 
“ Till lately,” it says, “ there was a summer-house 
erected by the great Sir Francis Bacon upon a small 
mount: it was open on all sides, and the roof supported 
by slender pillars. A few years ago the uninterrupted 
prospect of the neighbouring fields, as far as the hills 
of Highgate and Hampstead, was obstructed by a hand- 
