hey bounded and engrossed the
view, so that natural surfaces should have no claim upon your eye,--if
they were the mere setting to a monster palace, whose colonnades and
balusters of marble edged away into colonnades and balusters of
box-wood, and these into a limitless extent of long green lines, which
are only lost to the eye where a distant fountain dashes its spray of
golden dust into the air,--as at Versailles,--there would be keeping.
But the Devonshire palace has quite other setting. Blue Derbyshire hills
are behind it; a grand, billowy slope of the comeliest park-land in
England rolls down from its terrace-foot to where the Derwent, under
hoary oaks, washes its thousand acres of meadow-vale, with a flow as
charming and limpid as one of Virgil's eclogues. It is such a setting
that carries the great quadrangle of Chatsworth Palace and its flanking
artificialities of rock and garden, like a black patch upon the face of
a fine woman of Charles's court.

This brings us upon our line of march again. Charles II. loved stiff
gardens; James II. loved stiff gardens; and William, with his
Low-Country tastes, out-stiffened both, with his

"topiary box a-row."

Lord Bacon has commended the formal style to public admiration by his
advocacy and example. The lesson was repeated at Cashiobury by the most
noble the Earl of Essex (of whom Evelyn writes,--"My Lord is not
illiterate beyond the rate of most noblemen of his age"). So also that
famous garden of Moor-Park in Hertfordshire, laid out by the witty
Duchess of Bedford, to whom Dr. Donne addresses some of his piquant
letters, was a model of old-fashioned and stately graces. Sir William
Temple praises it beyond reason in his "Garden of Epicurus," and
cautions readers against undertaking any of those irregularities of
garden-figures which the Chinese so much affect. He admires only
stateliness and primness. "Among us," he says, "the Beauty of Building
and Planting is placed chiefly in some certain Proportions, Symmetries,
or Uniformities; our Walks and our Trees ranged so as to answer one
another, and at exact Distances."

From all these it is clear what was the garden-drift of the century.
Even Waller, the poet,--whose moneys, if he were like most poets, could
not be thrown away idly,--spent a large sum in levelling the hills
about his rural home at Beaconsfields. (We shall find a different poet
and treatment by-and-by in Shenstone.)

Only Milton, speaking from the v