tine."

How it must have smitten the King's heart to remember that the tender
poet, whose rhythm none could appreciate better than he, was also the
sturdy Puritan pamphleteer whose blows had thwacked so terribly upon the
last props that held up his tottering throne!

Cromwell, as we have seen, gave Master Hartlib a pension; but whether on
the score of his theological tracts, or his design for an agricultural
college, would be hard to say. I suspect that the hop was the
Protector's favorite among flowering plants, and that his admiration of
trees was measured by their capacity for timber. Yet that rare masculine
energy, which he and his men carried with them in their tread all over
England, was a very wakeful stimulus to productive agriculture.

Charles II. loved tulips, and befriended Evelyn. In his long residence
at Paris he had grown into a great fondness for the French gardens. He
afterward sent for Le Notre--who had laid out Versailles at an expense
of twenty millions of dollars--to superintend the planting of Greenwich
and St. James. Fortunately, no strict imitation of Versailles was
entered upon. The splendors of Chatsworth Garden grew in this time out
of the exaggerated taste, and must have delighted the French heart of
Charles. Other artists have had the handling of this great domain since
the days of Le Notre. A crazy wilderness of rock-work, amid which the
artificial waters commit freak upon freak, has been strewed athwart the
lawn; a stately conservatory has risen, under which the Duke may drive,
if he choose, in coach and four, amid palm-trees, and the
monster-vegetation of the Eastern archipelago; the little glass temple
is in the gardens, under which the Victoria lily was first coaxed into
British bloom; a model village has sprung up at the Park gates, in which
each cottage is a gem, and seems transplanted from the last book on
rural ornamentation. But the sight of the village oppresses one with a
strange incongruity; the charm of realism is wanting; it needs a
population out of one of Watteau's pictures,--clean and deft as the
painted figures; flesh and blood are too gross, too prone to muddy
shoes, and to--sneeze. The rock-work, also, is incongruous; it belongs
on no such wavy roll of park-land; you see it a thousand times grander,
a half-hour's drive away, toward Matlock. And the stiff parterres,
terraces, and alleys of Le Notre are equally out of place in such a
scene. If, indeed, as at Versailles, t