In the “Century of Inventions of the Marquis of Worcester,” explained and illustrated by Mr. Partington, there is mention by the marquis of “an artificial fountain, to be turned like an hour glass by a child, in the twinkling of an eye, it yet holding great quantities of water, and of force sufficient to make snow, ice, and thunder, with the chirping and singing of birds, and showing of several shapes and effects usual to fountains of pleasure.” Mr. Partington observes on this, that “how a fountain of water can produce snow, ice, thunder, and the singing of birds, is not easy to comprehend.”
Sir Henry Wotton discoursing on architecture remarks thus:—“Fountains are figured, or only plain watered works; of either of which I will describe a matchless pattern. The first, done by the famous hand of Michael Angelo da Buonaroti, is the figure of a sturdy woman, washing and winding linen clothes; in which act she wrings out the water that made the fountain; which was a graceful and natural conceit in the artificer, implying this rule, that all designs of this kind should be proper.[232] The other doth merit some larger expression: there went a long, straight, mossie walk of competent breadth, green and soft under foot, listed on both sides with an aqueduct of white stone, breast-high, which had a hollow channel on the top, where ran a pretty trickling stream; on the edge whereof were couched very thick, all along, certain small pipes of lead, in little holes; so neatly, that they could not be well perceived, till by the turning of a cock, they did sprout over interchangeably, from side to side, above man’s height, in forms of arches, without any intersection or meeting aloft, because the pipes were not exactly opposite; so as the beholder, besides that which was fluent in the aqueduct on both hands in his view, did walk as it were under a continual bower and hemisphere of water, without any drop falling on him; an invention for refreshment, surely far excelling all the Alexandrian delicacies, and pnuematicks of Hero.”[233] An invention of greater solace could not have been desired in the canicular days, by those who sought shelter from the heat; nor more coveted by any than by him, who is constrained to supply the “every-day” demand of “warm” friends for this little work—no “cool” task!
FLORAL DIRECTORY.
Red Chironia. Chironia Centaureum.
Dedicated to St. Martha.
[231] Mr. Loudon’s “Encyclopædia of Gardening,” a book of practical and curious facts, with hundreds of interesting engravings, is a most useful volume to any one who has a garden, or wishes to form one.
[232] Any one possessing a figure of this fountain designed by Michael Angelo, and probably seen by Wotton during his travels in Italy, will much oblige the editor by lending it to him for the purpose of being copied and inserted in the Every-Day Book.
[233] Reliq. Wotton.