372 THE GARDEN-CRAFT OF SHAKESPEARE 
That look too lofty in our commonwealth : 
All must be even in our government. 
You thus employ’d, I would go root away 
The noisome weeds, which without profit suck 
The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers. 
O, what pity is it, 
That he had not so trimm’d and dress’d his land 
As we this garden ! We at time of year 
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-trees, 
Lest, being over-proud in sap and blood, 
With too much riches it confound itself: 
Had he done so to great and growing men, 
They might have lived to bear and he to taste 
Their fruits of duty ; superfluous branches 
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live : 
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown 
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down. 
Richard //, iii. 4, 29. 
This most interesting passage would almost tempt us to 
say that Shakespeare was a gardener by profession; certainly 
no other passages that have been brought to prove his real 
profession are more minute than this. It proves him to have 
had practical experience in the work, and I think we may 
safely say that he was no mere ’prentice hand in the use of the 
pruning knife. 
The art of pruning in his day was probably exactly like our 
own, as far as regarded fruit trees and ordinary garden work, 
but in one important particular the pruner’s art of that day was 
a far more laborious art than it is now. The topiary art must 
have been the triumph of pruning, and when gardens were full 
of castles, monsters, beasts, birds, fishes, and men, all cut out 
of Box and Yew, and kept so exact that they boasted of being 
the “living representations” and “counterfeit presentments” 
of these various objects, the hands and head of the pruner 
could seldom have been idle; the pruning knife and scissors 
must have been in constant demand from the first day of the 
year to the last. The pruner of that day was, in fact, a 
sculptor, who carved his images out of Box and Yew instead 
of marble, so that in an amusing article in the “ Guardian ” 
