The former early raised a protest, for in the times of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, when Topiary was the prevailing taste if not the general fashion, he wrote, “I for my part do not like images cut in juniper or other garden stuff; they be for children.” It was Bacon also who said: “As for the making of knots or figures that they may lie under the windows of the house on that side which the garden stands, they be but toys; you may see as good sights many times in tarts.” But, alas, Bacon was curiously inconsistent. He would away with Topiary, but he puts forward as the best type of a garden one that is square, enclosed in an arched hedge, “with a turret over every arch, and a cage of birds in each turret, and over every space between the arches some other little figure with broad plates of round coloured glass, gilt, for the sun to play on.” Those who so aptly quote Bacon when they pour out the vials of their wrath upon Topiary through the medium of the public press, may also be further reminded that Bacon would have in his ideal garden a fountain “embellished with coloured glass and such things of lustre.”
MUNTHAM COURT, SUSSEX
But however much we may chuckle over the inconsistencies of Bacon it must be remembered that the age in which he lived (1561–1626) was remarkable rather for ostentatious display than for good taste,—as we count good taste,—and consequently his horticultural purview was limited and obscured. As the poet Mason puts it:—
“The age of tourney triumphs, and quaint masques,
Glar’d with fantastic pageantry, which dimm’d
The sober eye of truth, and dazzled ev’n
The sage himself; witness the high arch’d hedge,
In pillar’d state by carpentry upborne,
With coloured mirrors deck’d, and prison’d birds.”