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FAMILIAR LECTURES ON USEFUL SCIENCES.

ON GARDENING.
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"THE best figure of a garden (says Sir William Temple) is either a square or an obloug, and either upon a flat or a descent: they have all their beauties, but the best I esteem is an oblong upon a descent. The beauty, the air, the view, make amends for the expence, which is very great in finishing and supporting the terrace walks, in levelling the parterres, and in the stone stairs that are necessary from one to the other. The perfectest figure of a garden I ever saw, either at home or abroad, was that of Moor Park in Hertfordshire, when I knew it about thirty years ago. It was made by the Countess of Bedford, esteemed among the greatest wits of her time, and celebrated by Dr. Donne; and with very great care, excellent contrivance, and much cost; but greater sums may be thrown away without effect or honour, if there want sense in proportion to money, or if nature be not followed;' which I take to be the great rule in this, and perhaps in every thing else, as far as the conduct not only of our lives but our governments. We shall see how natuval that admired garden was. Because I take the garden I have named to have been in all kinds the most beautiful and perfect, at least in the figure and disposition, that I ever have seen, I will describe it for a model to those that meet with such a situation, and are above the regards of common expence. It lies on the side of a hill, upon which the house stands, but not very steep. The length of the house, where the best rooms and of most use or pleasure are, lies upon the breadth of the garden; the great parlour opens into the middle of a terrace gravel walk that lies even with it, and which may be, as I remember, about three hundred paces long, and broad in proportion; the border set with standard laurels and at large distances, which have the beauty of orange From this walk trees out of flower and fruit. are three descents by many stone steps, in the middle and at each end, into a very large parterre. This is divided into quarters by gravel walks, and adorned with two fountains and eight statues in the several quarters. At the end of the terrace walk are two summer houses, and the sides of the parterre are ranged with No. XXXVII. Vol. V.

two large cloisters open to the garden, upon arches of stone, and ending with two other summer houses even with the cloisters, which are paved with stone, and designed for walks of shade, there being none other in the whole parterre. Over these two cloisters are two terraces covered with lead and fenced with balusters; and the passage into these airy walks is out of the two summer houses at the end of the first terrace walk. The cloister facing the south is covered with vines, and would have been proper for an orange house, and the other for myrties or other more common greens, and had, I doubt not, been cast for that purpose, if this piece of gardening had been then in as much vogue as it is now. From the middle of this parterre is a descent by many steps flying on each side of a grotto, that lies between them, covered with lead and flat, into the lower garden, which is all fruit trees ranged about the several quarters of a wilderness, which is very shady; the walks here are all green, the grotto embellished with figures of shell rock-work, fountains, and water-works. If the hill had not ended with the lower garden, and the wall were not bounded by a common way that goes through the park, they might have added a third quarter of all greens; but this want is supplied by a garden on the other side of the house, which is all of that sort, very wild, shady, and adorned with rough rock work and fountains. This was Moor Park when I was acquainted with it, and the sweetest place, I think, that I have seen in my life, either before or since, at home or abroad."

It is unnecessary to add any remarks on this description. Any man might design and build as sweet a garden, who had been born in and never stirred out of Holborn. It was not, however, peculiar to Sir William Temple to think in that manner. How many Frenchmen are our gardens, and still there who have seen prefer natural flights of steps and shady cloisters covered with lead! Le Notre, the architect of the groves and grottoes at Versailles, came hither on a mission to improve our taste. He planted St. James's and Greenwich Parks po great monuments of his invention,

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To do farther justice to Sir William Temple, we must not omit what he adds. "What I have said of the best forms of gardens is meant only, of such as are in some sort regular; for there may be other forms wholly irregular, that may, for ought I know, have more beauty than any of the others; but they must owe it to some extraordinary dispositions of nature in the seat, or some great race of fancy or judgment in the contrivance, which may reduce many disagreeing parts into some figure, which shall yet, upon the whole, be very agreeable. Something of this I have seen in some places, but heard more of it from others who have lived much among the Chinese, a people whose way of thinking seems to lie as wide of ours in Europe as their country does. Their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts, that shall be commonly or easily observed. And though we have hardly any notion of this sort of beauty, yet they have a particular word to express it: and when they find it hit their eye at first sight, they say the Sharawadgì is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem: but I should hardly advise any of these attempts in the figure of gardens among us; they are adventures of too hard achievement for any common hands; and though there may be more honour if they succeed well, yet there is more dishonour if they fail, and it is twenty to one they will; whereas in regular figures it is hard to make any great and remarkable faults"

Fortunately Kent and a few others were not quite so timid, or we might still be going up and down stairs in the open air. It is true, we have heard much lately, as Sir William Temple did, of irregularity and imitations of nature in the gardens or grounds of the Chinese. The former is certainly true: they are as whimsically irregular, as European gardens are formally uniform and unvaried :-but with regard to nature, it seems as much avoided as in the squares and oblongs and straight lines of our ancestors. An artificial perpendicular rock starting out of a flat plain, and connected with nothing, often pierced through in various places with oval hollows, has no more pretension to be deemed natural than a lineal terrace or a parterre. The late Mr. Joseph Spence, who had both taste and zeal for the present style, was so persuaded of the Chinese Emperor's pleasure ground being laid out on principles resembling ours, that he translated and published, under the name of Sir Harry Beaumont, a particular account of that enclosure from the collection of the letters of the

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Jesuits. But except a determined irregularity, one can find nothing in it that gives any idea of attention being paid to nature. It is of vast circumference, and contains two hundred palaces, besides as many contiguous for the eunuchs, all gilt, painted, and varnished. There are raised bills from twenty to sixty feet high, streams and lakes, and one of the latter five miles round. These waters are passed by bridges ;--but even their bridges must not be straight, they serpentize as much as the rivulets, and are sometimes so long as to he furnished with resting-places, and begin and end with triumphal arches. The colonnades undulate in the same manner. In short, this pretty gaudy scene is the work of caprice and whim, and, when we reflect on their buildings, presents no image but that of unsubstantial tawariness. Nor is this all. Within this fantastic paradise is a square town, each side a mile long. Here the eunuchs of the court, too, entertain his Imperial Majesty with the bustle and business of the capital in which he resides, but which his dignity will not permit him to see, act merchants and all sorts of trades, and even designedly exercise for his royal amusement every art of knavery that is practised under his auspicious government. Methinks this is the childish solace and repose of grandeur, not a retirement from affairs to the delights of rural life. Here too his Majesty plays at agriculture: there is a quarter set apart for that purpose; the eunuchs sow, reap, and carry in their harvest, in the imperial presence; and his Majesty returns to Pekin, persuaded that he has been in the country.

Having thus cleared our way by ascertaining what have been the ideas on gardening in all ages as far as we have materials to judge by, it remains to show to what degree Mr. Keut invented the new style, and what hints he had received to suggest and conduct his undertaking.

We have seen what Moor Park was, when pronounced a standard. But as no succeeding generation in au opulent and luxurioas country contents itself with the perfection established by its ancestors, more perfect perfection was still sought; and improvements had gone on, till London and Wise had stocked all our gardens with giants, animals, monsters, coats of armis, and mottoes, in yew, box, aud holly. Absurdity could go no farther, and the tide turned. Bridgman, the next fashionable designer of gardens, was far more chaste; and whether from good sense, or that the nation had been struck and reformed by the admirable paper in the Guardian, No. 173, he banished verdant sculpture, and did not even

revert to the square precision of the foregoing age. He enlarged his plans, disdained to make every division tally to its opposite; and though he still adhered much to straight walks with high clipped hedges, they were only his great lines; the rest he diversified by wilderness, and with loose groves of oak, though still within surrounding hedges. As his reformation gained footing, he ventured, in the royal gar. den at Richmond, to introduce cultivated fields, and even morsels of a forest appearance, by the sides of those endless and tiresome walks that stretched out of one into another without intermission. But this was not till other innovators had broken loose too from rigid symmetry.

But the capital stroke, the leading step to all that has followed, was the destruction of walls for boundaries, and the invention of fosses-an attempt then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Ha's! to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk.

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named. The introduction of foreign trees and plants, which we owe principally to Archibald Duke of Argyle, contributed essentially to the richness of colouring so peculiar to our modern landscape. The mixture of various greens, the contrast of forms between our forest trees and the northern and West Indian firs and pines, are improvements more recent than Kent, or but little known to him. The weeping willow, and every florid shrub, each tree of delicate or bold leaf, are new tints in the composition of our gardens.

But just as the encomiums are that have been bestowed on Kent's discoveries, he was Beither without assistance or faults. Mr. Pope undoubtedly contributed to form his taste. The design of the Prince of Wales's garden at Carlton house was evidently borrowed from the poet's at Twickenham. There was a little of affected modesty in the latter, when he said, of all his works he was most proud of his garden. And yet it was a singular effort of art and taste to impress so much variety and scenery on a spot of five acres. The passing through the gloom from the grotto to the opening day, the retiring and again assembling shades, the dusky groves, the larger lawn, and the solemnity of the termination at the cypresses that lead up to his mother's tomb, are managed with exquisite judgment; and though Lord Peterborough assisted him

To form his quincunx and to rank his vines, those were not the most pleasing ingredients of his little perspective.

Having routed professed art (for the modern gardener exerts his talents to conceal his art), Kent, like other reformers, knew not how to stop at the just limits. He had followed Nat ture, and imitated her so happily that he began to think all her works were equally pro

A sunk fence may be called the leading step, for these reasons. No sooner was this simple enchantment made, than levelling, mowing, and rolling, followed. The contiguous ground of the park without the sunk fence was to be harmonized with the lawn within; and the garden in its turn was to be set free from its prime regularity, that it might assort with the wilder country without. The sunk fence ascertained the specific garden; but that it might not draw too obvious a line of distinetion between the neat and the rude, the coutiguous out-lying parts came to be included in a kind of general design; and when nature was taken into the plan, under improvements, every step that was made pointed out new beauties, and inspired new ideas. At that moment appeared Kent, painter enough to taste || per for imitation. In Kensington garden he the charms of landscape, bold, and opiniona-planted dead trees to give a greater air of truth tive enough to dare and to dictate, and born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden. He felt the delicions contrast of hill and valley changing imperceptibly into each other, tasted the beauty of the gentle swell or concave scoop, and remarked how loose groves crowned an easy eminence with happy ornament; and while they called in the distant view between their graceful stems, removed and extended the perspective by delusive comparison.

Succeeding artists have added new masterstrokes to these touches; perhaps improved or brought to pe. fection some that have been

to the scene-but he was son laughed out of this excess. His ruling principle was, that mature abhors a straight line. His mimics (for every genius has his apes,) seemed to think that she could love nothing but what was crooked. Yet so many men oftaste of all rauks devoted themselves to the new improvements, that it is surprising how much beauty has been struck out with how few absurdities. Still in some lights the reformation seems to have been pushed too far. Though an avenue Crossing a park or separating a lawn, and intercepting views from the seat to which it leads, are capital faults; yet a great avenue cut through woods, perhaps before entering a park, has a noble air, and,

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And thy bowers I have wound, when the tints Ye banks where I've roam'd unaffected by care,

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Ah! no hand its force can stay,
All will soon be swept away!
'Midst the ruins of the year,
See the cheerful bird appear,
Who, of all the warbling train,
Hails alone sad winter's reign ;
And thro' each dark and dreary day,
Sings the lonely hours away!

Sweet bird! a summer bright as thine
Did once within this bosom shine;
But now the wint'ry hour draws near-
Fast, fast my comforts disappear,
And sinking from my clouded heart,
I feel the sun of bliss depart!
But shall thy sweet example be
Unheeded, gentle bird, by me?
Or shall its influence fail to move
A wish of emulated love?
No! I will view thy patient form,
And learn to bear the beating storm!
Back to the past I'll turn my eyes;
How many blessings there arise!
Blessings so undeserv'd that still

My heart must feel th' ungrateful thrill.
Sweet monitor! I'll learn to be
All cheerfully resign'd-like thee.

TO ERIN MAVOURNEEN.

TRANSLATED FROM THE ANCIENT IRISH OF DEELISH THE BARD..

THOU dear seducer of my heart,

Foud cause of ev'ry struggling sigh, No more can I conceal love's smart,

No more restrain the ardent eye. What though this tongue did never move, To tell of all its master's pain, My eyes, my looks have spoke my love! My Charmer shall they speak in vain?

My fond imagination warm,

Presents thee at the noontide beam; And sleep gives back thy Angel form, To clasp thee in the midnight dream.

My Erin, tho' no splendid store

I boast a venal heart to move-
Yet, Charmer, I am far from poor,
For I am more than rich in love.
Pulse of my beating heart! shall all

My hopes of thee and peace be fled?
Unheeded wilt thou hear me fail?
Unpitied wilt thou see me dead?
I'll make a cradle of my breast,

Thy image all its child shall be;
My throbbing heart shall rock to rest

Those cares which waste my life and me.

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