"To walk amongst orchards, gardens, bowers, mounts, and arbours, artificial wildernesses, green thickets, arches, groves, lawns, rivulets, fountains, and such like pleasant places, (like that Antiochian Daphne,) brooks, pools, fishponds, between wood and water, in a fair meadow, by a river side, ubi variae avium cantationes, florum colores, pratorum frutices, &c. to disport in some pleasant plain, or park, run up a steep hill sometimes, or sit in a shady seat, must needs be a delectable recreation. Hortus principis et domus ad delectationem facta, cum sylvâ, monte et piscinâ, vulgò la montagna: the prince's garden at Ferrara, Schottus highly magnifies, with the groves, mountains, ponds, for a delectable prospect; he was much affected with it; a Persian paradise, or pleasant park, could not be more delectable in his sight. St. Bernard, in the description of his monastery, is almost ravished with the pleasures of it. "A sick man (saith he) sits upon a green bank, and when the dog-star parcheth the plains, and dries up rivers, he lies in a shady bower," Fronde sub arborea ferventia temperat astra, "and feeds his eyes with variety of objects, herbs, trees, to comfort his misery; he receives many delightsome smells, and fills his ears with that sweet and various harmony of birds; good God, (saith he), what a company of pleasures hast thou made for man!"
"The country hath his recreations, the city his several gymnics and exercises, May games, feasts, wakes, and merry meetings to solace themselves; the very being in the country; that life itself is a sufficient recreation to some men, to enjoy such pleasures, as those old patriarchs did. Dioclesian, the emperor, was so much affected with it, that he gave over his sceptre, and turned gardener. Constantine wrote twenty books of husbandry. Lysander, when ambassadors came to see him, bragged of nothing more than of his orchard, hi sunt ordines mei. What shall I say of Cincinnatus, Cato, Tully, and many such? how they have been pleased with it, to prune, plant, inoculate and graft, to show so many several kinds of pears, apples, plums, peaches, &c."
The Romans of all ranks made use of flowers as ornaments and emblems, but they were not generally so fond of directing or assisting the gardener, or taking the spade or hoe into their own hands, as are the British peasantry, gentry and nobility of the present day. They were not amateur Florists. They prized highly their fruit trees and pastures and cool grottoes and umbrageous groves; but they expended comparatively little time, skill or taste upon the flower-garden. Even their love of nature, though thoroughly genuine as far as it went, did not imply that minute and exact knowledge of her charms which characterizes some of our best British poets. They had no Thompson or Cowper. Their country seats were richer in architectural than floral beauty. Tully's Tuscan Villa, so fondly and minutely described by the proprietor himself, would appear to little advantage in the eyes of a true worshipper of Flora, if compared with Pope's retreat at Twickenham. The ancients had a taste for the rural, not for the gardenesque, nor perhaps even for the picturesque. The English have a taste for all three. Hence they have good landscape-gardeners and first-rate landscape-painters. The old Romans had neither. But though, some of our Spitalfields weavers have shown a deeper love, and perhaps even a finer taste, for flowers, than were exhibited by the citizens of Rome, abundant evidence is furnished to us by the poets in all ages and in all countries that nature, in some form or another has ever charmed the eye and the heart of man. The following version of a famous passage in Virgil, especially the lines in Italics, may give the English reader some idea of a Roman's dream of
RURAL HAPPINESS.
Ah! happy Swains! if they their bliss but knew,
Whom, far from boisterous war, Earth's bosom true
With easy food supplies. If they behold
No lofty dome its gorgeous gates unfold
And pour at morn from all its chambers wide
Of flattering visitants the mighty tide;
Nor gaze on beauteous columns richly wrought,
Or tissued robes, or busts from Corinth brought;
Nor their white wool with Tyrian poison soil,
Nor taint with Cassia's bark their native oil;
Yet peace is theirs; a life true bliss that yields;
And various wealth; leisure mid ample fields,
Grottoes, and living lakes, and vallies green,
And lowing herds; and 'neath a sylvan screen,
Delicious slumbers. There the lawn and cave
With beasts of chase abound. The young ne'er crave
A prouder lot; their patient toil is cheered;
Their Gods are worshipped and their sires revered;
And there when Justice passed from earth away
She left the latest traces of her sway.
D.L.R.
Lord Bacon was perhaps the first Englishman who endeavored to reform the old system of English gardening, and to show that it was contrary to good taste and an insult to nature. "As for making knots or figures," he says, "with divers colored earths, that may lie under the windows of the house on that side on which the garden stands, they be but toys: you may see as good sights many times in tarts." Bacon here alludes, I suppose, to the old Dutch fashion of dividing flowerbeds into many compartments, and instead of filling them with flowers, covering one with red brick dust, another with charcoal, a third with yellow sand, a fourth with chalk, a fifth with broken China, and others with green glass, or with spars and ores. But Milton, in his exquisite description of the garden of Eden, does not allude to the same absurd fashion when he speaks of "curious knots,"
Which not nice art,
In beds and curious knots, but nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain.
By these curious knots the poet seems to allude, not to figures of "divers colored earth," but to the artificial and complicated arrangements and divisions of flowers and flower-beds.