THE LURE OF THE GARDEN 
pletely satisfies the demand for beauty,* without reveal¬ 
ing anything of the garden itself. 
The variety of beauty attained both in England and 
Scotland by modifications of these brick and stone 
walls with wrought-iron gates is truly wonderful. 
Sometimes the family arms are sculptured on the pil¬ 
lars or the arch, or perhaps an ancient quotation or 
battle-cry. Sometimes a Gothic touch is given by 
strange animals that peer down upon the visitor, or by 
a gate-house whose architecture harmonizes with that 
of the main building. A French writer in the early 
years of the nineteenth century insists particularly 
upon this point, asserting that the chief entrance to the 
grounds should correspond to the house to which it 
belongs, should promise it, as it were. Let the gate to 
a princely place be princely, he says, immense and 
heavy, or springing into airy arches according as it is 
a castle or a palace to whose grounds you are being 
admitted; but to a simple cottage garden the gate 
should be simple too; a swinging lattice, a pierced 
door painted green, or a turnstile between white posts. 
The English castles and abbeys built before the 
Stuart reigns possessed no such gardens as distinguish 
the later places. But they owned their closes and trim 
parterres, within their massive walls and behind great 
battlemented gate-houses, ivy-buried, turreted, and 
pierced by low arches. Dunster Castle, built under 
Henry II, has such an entrance, a fine building of 
196 
