into a place cunningly set with trees of the most taste-pleasing
fruits: but scarcely they had taken that into consideration, but that
they were suddenly stept into a delicate greene; of each side of the
greene a thicket, and behind the thickets againe new beds of flowers,
which being under the trees, the trees were to them a pavilion, and they
to the trees a mosaicall floore....

[Illustration: A SHEPHERD OF ARCADY, FROM THE TITLE-PAGE OF SIDNEY'S
"ARCADIA."]

"In the middest of all the place was a faire pond, whose shaking
cristall was a perfect mirrour to all the other beauties, so that it
bare shew of two gardens, one in deed, the other in shadowes. And in one
of the thickets was a fine fountaine made thus: a naked Venus of white
marble, wherin the graver had used such cunning that the natural blue
veins of the marble were framed in fit places to set forth the
beautifull veines of her body. At her breast she had her babe AEneas, who
seemed, having begun to sucke, to leave that, to look upon her faire
eyes, which smiled at the babe's folly, meane while the breast
running."[198] The effect produced must undoubtedly have been very
pleasant, but scarcely more "natural" than the embellishments
recommended by Bacon, who declares that hedges and arbours ought to be
enlivened by the songs of birds; and that to make such enlivening sure
and permanent, the birds should be secured in cages. A good example of a
garden in Sidney's time with beds of flowers, arbours, pavilions, and
covered galleries is to be seen in his own portrait by Isaac Oliver, of
which we give a reproduction. It must be noticed that only the lower
part of the long gallery at the back is built; the vault-shaped upper
portion is painted green, being supposed to be made of actual leaves and
foliage. Except for such books as Sidney's it could not be said of those
gardens that "they too were once in Arcady."

[Illustration: A PRINCESS OF ARCADY, FROM THE TITLE-PAGE OF SIDNEY'S
"ARCADIA."]

Costumes and furniture are of the same style, and accord with such
gardens much more than with shepherd life. They are pure Renaissance,
half Italian and half English. Musidorus disguised as a shepherd,
dresses his hair in such a way as to look much more like one of the
Renaissance Roman Emperors at Hampton Court than like a keeper of sheep:
we see him while receiving a lesson on the use of the "sheep-hooke,"
wearing "a garland of laurell mixt with cypres leaves on his he