"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.
Though Bacon went not quite so freely to nature as our latest landscape-
gardeners have done, he made the first step in the right direction and
deserves therefore the compliment which Mason has paid him in his poem
of The English Garden.
On thy realm
Philosophy his sovereign lustre spread;
Yet did he deign to light with casual glance
The wilds of Taste, Yes, sagest Verulam,
'Twas thine to banish from the royal groves
Each childish vanity of crisped knot[008]
And sculptured foliage; to the lawn restore
Its ample space, and bid it feast the sight
With verdure pure, unbroken, unabridged;
For verdure soothes the eye, as roseate sweets
The smell, or music's melting strains the ear.
Yes--"verdure soothes the eye:"--and the mind too. Bacon himself
observes, that "nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass
kept finely shorn." Mason slightly qualifies his commendation of "the
sage" by admitting that he had not quite completed his emancipation from
the bad taste of his day.
Witness his high arched hedge
In pillored state by carpentry upborn,
With colored mirrors decked and prisoned birds.
But, when our step has paced the proud parterre,
And reached the heath, then Nature glads our eye
Sporting in all her lovely carelessness,
There smiles in varied tufts the velvet rose,
There flaunts the gadding woodbine, swells the ground
In gentle hillocks, and around its sides
Through blossomed shades the secret pathway steals.
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