he compares an ill governed state to a neglected garden.

Why should we, in the compass of a pale,
Keep law, and form, and due proportion,
Showing, as in a model, our firm estate?
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds; her finest flowers choked up,
Her fruit-trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined,
Her _knots_ disordered, and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars.

There is an allusion to garden _knots_ in _Holinshed's Chronicle_. In
1512 the Earl of Northumberland "had but one gardener who attended
hourly in the garden for setting of erbis and _chipping of knottis_ and
sweeping the said garden clean."

[009] Ovid, in his story of Pyramus and Thisbe, tells us that the black
Mulberry was originally white. The two lovers killed themselves under a
white Mulberry tree and the blood penetrating to the roots of the tree
mixed with the sap and gave its color to the fruit.

[010] _Revived Adonis_,--for, according to tradition he died every year
and revived again. _Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son_,--that is, of
Ulysses, whom he entertained on his return from Troy. _Or that, not
mystic_--not fabulous as the rest, but a real garden which Solomon made
for his wife, the daughter of Pharoah, king of Egypt--WARBURTON

"Divested of harmonious Greek and bewitching poetry," observes Horace
Walpole, "the garden of Alcinous was a small orchard and vineyard with
some beds of herbs and two fountains that watered them, inclosed within
a quickset hedge." Lord Kames, says, still more boldly, that it was
nothing but a kitchen garden. Certainly, gardening amongst the ancient
Greeks, was a very simple business. It is only within the present
century that it has been any where elevated into a fine art.

[011] "We are unwilling to diminish or lose the credit of Paradise, or
only pass it over with [the Hebrew word for] _Eden_, though the Greek be
of a later name. In this excepted, we know not whether the ancient
gardens do equal those of late times, or those at present in Europe. Of
the gardens of Hesperides, we know nothing singular, but some golden
apples. Of Alcinous his garden, we read nothing beyond figs, apples,
olives; if we allow it to be any more than a fiction of Homer, unhappily
placed in Corfu, where the sterility of the soil makes men believe there
was no such thing at all. The gardens of Adonis were so empty that they
afforded proverbial expression, and the principa