ery arcana of the Puritan rigidities,
breaks in upon these geometric formalities with the rounded graces of
the garden which he planted in Eden. There

"the crisped brooks,
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold
With mazy error under pendent shades,
Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art
In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain."

Going far behind all conventionalities, he credited to Paradise--the
ideal of man's happiest estate--variety, irregularity, profusion,
luxuriance; and to the fallen estate, precision, formality, and an
inexorable Art, which, in place of concealing, glorified itself. In the
next century, when Milton comes to be illustrated by Addison and the
rest, we shall find gardens of a different style from those of Waller
and of Hampton Court.

And now from some look-out point near to the close of the seventeenth
century, when John Evelyn, in his age, is repairing the damages that
Peter the Great has wrought in his pretty Deptford home, let us take a
bird's-eye glance at rural England.

It is raining; and the clumsy Bedford coach, drawn by stout Flemish
mares,--for thorough-breds are as yet unknown,--is covered with a
sail-cloth to keep the wet away from the six "insides." The grass,
wherever the land is stocked with grass, is as velvety as now. The wheat
in the near county of Herts is fair, and will turn twenty bushels to the
acre; here and there an enterprising landholder has a small field of
dibbled grain, which will yield a third more. John Worlidge's drill is
not in request, and is only talked of by a few wiseacres who prophesy
its ultimate adoption. The fat bullocks of Bedford will not dress more
than seven hundred a head; and the cows, if killed, would not overrun
five hundred weight. There are occasional fields of sainfoin and of
turnips; but these latter are small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet
practised. From time to time appears a patch of barren moorland, which
has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance with the suggestions
of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving. Wide
reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear great
crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by
ghost-like companies of cranes.

The gardens attached to noble houses, under the care of some pupil of
Wis