362 THE GARDEN-CRAFT OF SHAKESPEARE 
And to that Vineyard is a planched gate 
That makes his opening with this bigger key : 
The other doth command a little door 
Which from the Vineyard to the garden leads. 
Measure for Measure, iv. i, 28. 
(3) The Prince and Count Claudio, walking in a thick-pleached alley in my 
orchard, were thus much overheard by a man of mine. 
Much Ado About Nothing, i. 2, 9. 
(4) Our bodies are our Gardens, &c. {See Hyssop, p. 133.) 
Othello, i. 3, 323. 
(5) Why should we, in the compass of a pale, 
Keep law and form and due proportion, 
Showing as in a model our firm estate, 
When our sea-walled Garden, the whole land, 
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up, 
Her fruit-trees all unpruned, her hedges ruin’d, 
Her knots disorder’d and her wholesome herbs 
Swarming with caterpillars ?— Richard II, iii. 4, 40. 
The flower-gardens of Shakespeare’s'time were very different 
to the flower-gardens of our day; but we have so many good 
descriptions of them in books and pictures that we have no 
difficulty in realizing them both in their general form and 
arrangement. I am now speaking only of the flower-gardens ; 
the kitchen-gardens and orchards were very much like our own, 
except in the one important difference, that they had necessarily 
much less glass than our modern gardens can command. In 
the flower-garden the grand leading principle was uniformity 
and formality carried out into very minute details. “ The 
garden is best to be square,” was Bacon’s rule; “the form 
that men like in general is a square, though roundness be 
forma perfedissimaf was Lawson’s rule ; and this form was 
chosen because the garden was considered to be a purtenance 
and continuation of the house, designed so as strictly to harmon¬ 
ize with the architecture of the building. And Parkinson’s 
advice was to the same effect: “ The orbicular or round form 
is held in its own proper existence to be the most absolute form, 
containing within it all other forms whatsoever; but few, I 
think, will chuse such a proportion to be joyned to their habita- 
