How

flowers offers pleasant flattery to the smell and sight, Nature alone, modestly arrayed, and never made up, there spreads out her ornaments and benefits. the fountains beget the shrubs and beautify them! How the shadows of the woods put the streams to sleep in beds of herbage." This is poetry! but it is well that one French writer (and he so distinguished) should be found to depict an English garden, when architects like Jussieu and Antoine Richard signally failed to reproduce the thing, to order, upon French soil! And the Petit Trianon was in itself an improvement upon, or rather a protest against, the sumptuous splendour of the Orangerie, the basins of Latona and of Neptune, and the superb tapis vert, with its bordering groves of clipt trees and shrubs. Yet here is Arthur Young's unflattering description of the Queen's Jardin Anglois at Trianon: "It contains about 100 acres, disposed in the taste of what we read of in books of Chinese gardening, whence it is supposed the English style was taken. There is more of Sir William Chambers here than of Mr. Brown, * more effort than Nature, and more expence than taste. It is not easy to conceive anything that Art can introduce in a garden that is not here; woods, rocks, lawns, lakes, rivers, islands, cascades, grottoes,

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* Miss Edwards (and I quote from her edition of Young's "Travels in France,” p. 101) has a note to the effect that the Mr. Brown here referred to is Robert Brown, of Markle, contributor to the Edinburgh Magazine, 1757-1831." Yet, surely this is none other than Mr. “Capability" Brown, discoverer of English scenery, reputed father of the English garden!

walks, temples, and even villages." Truly a Jardin Anglois!

We may well prefer Diderot's simile for the English garden as "the sanctuary of a sweet and placid pleasure" to the bustling crowd of miscellaneous elements that took its name in vain in the Petit Trianon!

For an English garden is at once stately and homely-homely before all things. Like all works of Art it is conventionally treated, and its design conscious and deliberate. But the convention is broad, dignified, quiet, homogeneous, suiting alike the characteristics of the country and of the people for whom it is made. Compared with this, the foreign garden must be allowed to be richer in provocation; there is distinctly more fancy in its conceits, and its style is more absolute and circumspect than the English. And yet, just as Browning says of imperfection, that it may sometimes mean "perfection hid," so, here our deficiencies may not mean defects.

In order that we may compare the English and foreign garden we must place them on common ground; and I will liken each to a pastoral romance. Nature is idealised, treated fancifully in each, yet how different the quality of the contents, the method of presentment, the style, the technique of this and that, even when the design is contemporaneous !

In

A garden is, I say, a sort of pastoral romance, woven upon a background of natural scenery. the exercise of his pictorial genius, both the foreign and English artist shall run upon natural things, and

View of the Fountains of the Cordonata, and the ascent which goes up to the

Broad Walk of Fountains. Villa Estense. Tivoli.

transcribe Nature imaginatively yet realisably; each composition shall have a pastoral air, and be rustic after its fashion. But how different the platform, how different the mental complexion, the technique of the artists! How different the detail and the atmosphere of the garden. The rusticity of the foreign garden is dished up in a more delectable form than is the case in the English, but there is not the same open-air feeling about this as about that; it does not convey the same sense of unexhausted possibilities-not the same tokens of living enjoyment of Nature, of heart-to-heart fellowship with her. The foreign garden is over-wrought, too full it is a passionless thing-like the gaudy birds of India, finely plumed but songless; like the prize rose, without sweetness.

Of the garden of Italy, who shall dare to speak critically. Child of tradition: heir by unbroken descent, inheritor of the garden-craft of the whole civilised world. It stands on a pinnacle high above the others, peerless and alone: fit for the loveliest of lands

and it may yet be seen upon its splendid scale, splendidly adorned, with straight terraces, marble statues, clipped ilex and box, walks bordered with azalea and camellia, surrounded with groves of pines and cypresses-so frankly artistic, yet so subtly blending itself into the natural surroundings—into

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