THE GARDEN-CRAFT OF SHAKESPEARE 359 
(16) The flowers are sweet, the colours fresh and trim, 
But true-sweet beauty lived and died with him. 
Venus and Adonis, 1079. 
(17) Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. 
Sonnet xviii. 
(18) With April’s first-born flowers, and all things rare 
That Heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems.— Ibid. , xxi. 
(19) The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet, 
Though to itself it only live and die ; 
But if that flower with base infection meet, 
The basest weed outbraves his dignity : 
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds ; 
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. 
Ibid. , xciv. 
(20) Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell 
Of different flowers in odour and in hue 
Could make me any summer’s story tell, 
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew. 
Ibid., xcviii. 
“ Of all the vain assertions of these coxcombical times, 
that which arrogates the pre-eminence in the true science of 
gardening is the vainest. True, our conservatories are full of 
the choicest plants from every clime: we ripen the Grape and 
the Pine-apple with an art unknown before, and even the 
Mango, the Mangosteen, and the Guava are made to yield 
their matured fruits ; but the real beauty and poetry of a 
garden are lost in our efforts after rarity, and strangeness, 
and variety.” So, nearly forty years ago, wrote the author 
of “ The Poetry of Gardening,” a pleasant, though somewhat 
fantastic essay, first published in the “ Carthusian,” and after¬ 
wards re-published in Murray’s “Reading for the Rail,” in 
company with an excellent article from the “ Quarterly ” by 
the same author under the title of “ The Flower Garden; ” 
and I quote it because this “ vain assumption ” is probably 
stronger and more wide-spread now than when that article 
was written. We often hear and read accounts of modern 
gardening in which it is coolly assumed, and almost taken for 
granted, that the science of horticulture, and almost the love 
