Charles was an appreciative lover of poetry, too, as well as of Nature. I wonder if it ever happened to him, in his prison-hours at Carisbrooke, to come upon Milton's "L'Allegro," (first printed in the very year of the Battle of Naseby,) and to read,—
"In thy right hand lead with thee
The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty;
And if I give thee honor due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreprovèd pleasures free;
To hear the lark begin his flight,
And, singing, startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come, in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good-morrow,
Through the sweetbrier, or the vine,
Or the twisted eglantine."
How it must have smitten the King's heart to remember that the tender poet, whose rhythm none could appreciate better than he, was also the sturdy Puritan pamphleteer whose blows had thwacked so terribly upon the last props that held up his tottering throne!
Cromwell, as we have seen, gave Master Hartlib a pension; but whether on the score of his theological tracts, or his design for an agricultural college, would be hard to say. I suspect that the hop was the Protector's favorite among flowering plants, and that his admiration of trees was measured by their capacity for timber. Yet that rare masculine energy, which he and his men carried with them in their tread all over England, was a very wakeful stimulus to productive agriculture.
Charles II. loved tulips, and befriended Evelyn. In his long residence at Paris he had grown into a great fondness for the French gardens. He afterward sent for Le Notre—who had laid out Versailles at an expense of twenty millions of dollars—to superintend the planting of Greenwich and St. James. Fortunately, no strict imitation of Versailles was entered upon. The splendors of Chatsworth Garden grew in this time out of the exaggerated taste, and must have delighted the French heart of Charles. Other artists have had the handling of this great domain since the days of Le Notre. A crazy wilderness of rock-work, amid which the artificial waters commit freak upon freak, has been strewed athwart the lawn; a stately conservatory has risen, under which the Duke may drive, if he choose, in coach and four, amid palm-trees, and the monster-vegetation of the Eastern archipelago; the little glass temple is in the gardens, under which the Victoria lily was first coaxed into British bloom; a model village has sprung up at the Park gates, in which each cottage is a gem, and seems transplanted from the last book on rural ornamentation. But the sight of the village oppresses one with a strange incongruity; the charm of realism is wanting; it needs a population out of one of Watteau's pictures,—clean and deft as the painted figures; flesh and blood are too gross, too prone to muddy shoes, and to—sneeze. The rock-work, also, is incongruous; it belongs on no such wavy roll of park-land; you see it a thousand times grander, a half-hour's drive away, toward Matlock. And the stiff parterres, terraces, and alleys of Le Notre are equally out of place in such a scene. If, indeed, as at Versailles, they bounded and engrossed the view, so that natural surfaces should have no claim upon your eye,—if they were the mere setting to a monster palace, whose colonnades and balusters of marble edged away into colonnades and balusters of box-wood, and these into a limitless extent of long green lines, which are only lost to the eye where a distant fountain dashes its spray of golden dust into the air,—as at Versailles,—there would be keeping. But the Devonshire palace has quite other setting. Blue Derbyshire hills are behind it; a grand, billowy slope of the comeliest park-land in England rolls down from its terrace-foot to where the Derwent, under hoary oaks, washes its thousand acres of meadow-vale, with a flow as charming and limpid as one of Virgil's eclogues. It is such a setting that carries the great quadrangle of Chatsworth Palace and its flanking artificialities of rock and garden, like a black patch upon the face of a fine woman of Charles's court.
This brings us upon our line of march again. Charles II. loved stiff gardens; James II. loved stiff gardens; and William, with his Low-Country tastes, out-stiffened both, with his
"topiary box a-row."
Lord Bacon has commended the formal style to public admiration by his advocacy and example. The lesson was repeated at Cashiobury by the most noble the Earl of Essex (of whom Evelyn writes,—"My Lord is not illiterate beyond the rate of most noblemen of his age"). So also that famous garden of Moor-Park in Hertfordshire, laid out by the witty Duchess of Bedford, to whom Dr. Donne addresses some of his piquant letters, was a model of old-fashioned and stately graces. Sir William Temple praises it beyond reason in his "Garden of Epicurus," and cautions readers against undertaking any of those irregularities of garden-figures which the Chinese so much affect. He admires only stateliness and primness. "Among us," he says, "the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly in some certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformities; our Walks and our Trees ranged so as to answer one another, and at exact Distances."
From all these it is clear what was the garden-drift of the century. Even Waller, the poet,—whose moneys, if he were like most poets, could not be thrown away idly,—spent a large sum in levelling the hills about his rural home at Beaconsfields. (We shall find a different poet and treatment by-and-by in Shenstone.)
Only Milton, speaking from the very arcana of the Puritan rigidities, breaks in upon these geometric formalities with the rounded graces of the garden which he planted in Eden. There