lanter, and in his life an exemplar to every British
gentleman.

Evelyn was educated at Oxford, travelled widely upon the Continent, was
a firm adherent of the royal party, and at one time a member of Prince
Rupert's famous troop. He married the daughter of the British ambassador
in Paris, through whom he came into possession of Say's Court, which he
made a gem of beauty. But in his later years he had the annoyance of
seeing his fine parterres and shrubbery trampled down by that Northern
boor, Peter the Great, who made his residence there while studying the
mysteries of ship-building at Deptford, and who had as little reverence
for a parterre of flowers as for any other of the tenderer graces of
life.

The British monarchs have always been more regardful of those interests
which were the object of Evelyn's tender devotion. I have already
alluded to the horticultural fancies of James I. His son Charles was an
extreme lover of flowers, as well as of a great many luxuries which
hedged him against all Puritan sympathy. "Who knows not," says Milton,
in his reply to the [Greek: EIKON BASIAIKE], "the licentious remissness
of his Sunday's theatre, accompanied with that reverend statute for
dominical jigs and May-poles, published in his own name," etc.?

But the poor king was fated to have little enjoyment of either jigs or
May-poles; harsher work belonged to his reign; and all his
garden-delights came to be limited finally to a little pot of flowers
upon his prison-window. And I can easily believe that the elegant,
wrong-headed, courteous gentleman tended these poor flowers daintily to
the very last, and snuffed their fragrance with a Christian gratitude.

Charles was an appreciative lover of poetry, too, as well as of Nature.
I wonder if it ever happened to him, in his prison-hours at Carisbrooke,
to come upon Milton's "L'Allegro," (first printed in the very year of
the Battle of Naseby,) and to read,--

"In thy right hand lead with thee
The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty;
And if I give thee honor due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreproved pleasures free;
To hear the lark begin his flight,
And, singing, startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come, in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good-morrow,
Through the sweetbrier, or the vine,
Or the twisted eglan