CHAPTER HOUSE AT WENLOCK.
BACON’S GARDEN
Then I thought of Lord Bacon’s beautiful garden of “prince-like” proportions. According to him, the ideal garden did not measure less than thirty acres, and was to be divided into three parts—a garden proper, a greene, a heath, or desert.
In the garden there was to be a succession of flowers. Germander, sweet briars, and gilly flowers, were some of those named, and the garden was always to be gay. He advocated many kinds of fruit, “cherries, rasps, apples, pears, plummes, grapes, and also peaches.”
In the heath or desert, were to be planted thickets of honeysuckle, and garlands of wild vine; while mole-hills were to be skilfully covered with wild thyme, with pinks, and in opening glades, sheets of violets, cowslips, daisies, and beare-foot, were each to have their place. Then long alleys were to be planted with burnet, wild thyme, and water-mint, which, when crushed, would, he tells us, “give out rich perfume.”
“Great Princes may add statues and such things for state and magnificence,” wrote Bacon; “but beyond these things is the true pleasure of a garden.” And there the great Chancellor was right, for we all know little plots and tiny greenhouses, worked and tended by loving hands, where the owner, and toiler, gets more pleasure out of a very small enclosure or a single frame, than a ducal proprietor out of many acres of horticultural magnificence. God is very just in pleasure, if not in wealth.
It was in his own beautiful garden at Gorhambury, that the great philosopher and master-mind wrote much that was beautiful. His was a strange character. He soared to heaven by his intellect, and fell to hell by his baseness. Ben Johnson wrote, “In his adversity I ever prayed that God would give him strength, for greatness he could not want.”
Bacon, be it said in sorrow, was one of the last of the bench who descended to torturing his victims. He wrote of the unfortunate Peacham, when he refused to answer his questions, “that he had a dumb devil.” Yet this man loved at other moments pure pleasures. His love of a garden was real, and deep, and no man understood more fully the heights and depths of the Christian Faith, or the higher flights of redeemed souls. “Prosperity,” he wrote, “is the blessing of the Old Testament; Adversity, the blessing of the New, which carrieth the greater benediction, and the clearer evidence of God’s favour.” “Prosperity,” he declared, “was not without many fears and distastes, and Adversity not without comforts and hopes. Prosperity doth best discover vice, but Adversity doth best discover virtue.” Nobody has ever approached Bacon for his beauty of expression. Shelley wrote of his style, “His language has a sweet, majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect.” Such natures as Lord Verulam’s are difficult for commonplace mortals to understand, for the head is of a god, and the feet, those of a beast. The young or inexperienced might call such men humbugs, or hypocrites; but, perhaps, the real truth is, that such men possess dual natures. In them is a spirit that knows the light, and seeks it, as the Chancellor swore he would seek the light; but to whom, also, the ways of darkness are not repellent, and who cannot resist the favour of man, and the false glamour of courts.
Then I thought of the fair gardens of history. I imagined the splendours of Nonsuch, laid out by bluff Harry, of which men said, “that the palace was encumbered with parks full of deer, and surrounded with delicious gardens and groves, ornamented with trellis works and cabinets of verdure, so that it seemed a place pitched upon by Pleasure herself, to dwell in along with Youth.”
It was also good to think of John Evelyn in his plantings, and during his long rides. I thought of him journeying in the south of France, along the Mediterranean coast, enjoying the sight there of the vineyards and olives. In fancy I beheld him scenting the orange and citron groves, and stopping to gaze “at the myrtle, pomegranates, and the like sweet plantations,” as he passed villa after villa, built, as he said, of glittering free-stone, which, in that clear atmosphere, made him think “of snow dropped from the clouds, amongst the verdure of the ilexes and perennial greens.”