THE LURE OF THE GARDEN 
grotto, flower-knot, and fountain, and the latter making 
use of the vernacular with all the liberty of a man at his 
ease. 
Bacon is among the first who presents us with a prose 
garden, setting forth his ideas on the subject with 
that precision and careful squaring of corners, that at¬ 
tention to detail so dear to his heart, both the garden and 
himself being decidedly formal. For even in the wilder¬ 
ness, or desert, as he calls it, which he includes, to be 
sure, being a man of too great a spirit not to realize 
both its charm and its value, one is conscious of a severe 
control. He begins by stating the planting of a garden 
to be the purest of human pleasures and the final product 
of civilization, and he says furthermore:— 
“I do hold it, in the royal ordering of gardens, there 
ought to be a garden for all the months of the year; in 
which, severally, things of beauty may be there in season. 
After enumerating many shrubs and flowers fit to plant 
in such a garden, where, “ if you will, you may have the 
Golden Age again, and a spring all the year long,” and 
discoursing delightfully of fragrant blossoms—“because 
the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it 
comes and goes like the warbling of music) than in the 
hand,” he shapes his garden for you to see. 
“The garden is best to be square, encompassed on all 
four sides with a stately arched hedge . . . this hedge I 
intend to be set upon a bank, not steep, but gently slope, 
of some six foot, set all with flowers ... I would also 
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