and rest the walkers' wearie shankes."

_F. Q._, iv, x, 25.

The main walks were not, as with us, bounded with the turf, but they
were bounded with trees, which were wrought into hedges, more or less
open at the sides, and arched over at the top. These formed the "close
alleys," "coven alleys," or "thick-pleached alleys," of which we read in
Shakespeare and others writers of that time. Many kinds of trees and
shrubs were used for this purpose; "every one taketh what liketh him
best, as either Privit alone, or Sweet Bryer and White Thorn interlaced
together, and Roses of one, two, or more sorts placed here and there
amongst them. Some also take Lavender, Rosemary, Sage, Southernwood,
Lavender Cotton, or some such other thing. Some again plant Cornel
trees, and plash them or keep them low to form them into a hedge; and
some again take a low prickly shrub that abideth always green, called in
Latin Pyracantha" (Parkinson). It was on these hedges and their adjuncts
that the chief labour of the garden was spent. They were cut and
tortured into every imaginable shape, for nothing came amiss to the
fancy of the topiarist. When this topiary art first came into fashion in
England I do not know, but it was probably more or less the fashion in
all gardens of any pretence from very early times, and it reached its
highest point in the sixteenth century, and held its ground as the
perfection of gardening till it was driven out of the field in the last
century by the "picturesque style," though many specimens still remain
in England, as at Levens[344:1] and Hardwicke on a large scale, and in
the gardens of many ancient English mansions and old farmhouses on a
smaller scale. It was doomed as soon as landscape gardeners aimed at the
natural, for even when it was still at its height Addison described it
thus: "Our British gardeners, instead of humouring Nature, love to
deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes,
and pyramids; we see the mark of the scissors upon every plant and
bush."

But this is a digression: I must return to the Elizabethan garden, which
I have hitherto only described as a great square, surrounded by wide,
covered, shady walks, and with other similar walks dividing the central
square into four or more compartments. But all this was introductory to
the great feature of the Elizabethan garden, the formation of the
"curious-knotted garden." Each of