ngs of the great Lord Bacon. When
this illustrious duke retired to his country seats, wounded to the heart
by the baseness of those who had flattered him when Henry was alive, his
noble and honest mind indulged in the embellishment of his gardens. I
will very briefly quote what history relates:--"The life he led in his
retreat at _Villebon_, was accompanied with grandeur and even majesty,
such as might be expected from a character so grave and full of dignity
as his. His table was served with taste and magnificence; he admitted to
it none but the nobility in his neighbourhood, some of the principal
gentlemen, and the ladies and maids of honour, who belonged to the
duchess of Sully. He often went into his gardens, and passing through a
little covered alley, which separated the flower from the kitchen
garden, ascended by a stone staircase (which the present duke of Sully
has caused to be destroyed), into a large walk of linden trees, upon a
terrace on the other side of the garden. It was then the taste to have a
great many narrow walks, very closely shaded with four or five rows of
trees, or palisadoes. Here he used to sit upon a settee painted green,
amused himself by beholding on the one side an agreeable landscape, and
on the other a second alley on a terrace extremely beautiful, which
surrounded a large piece of water, and terminated by a wood of lofty
trees. There was scarce one of his estates, those especially which had
castles on them, where he did not leave marks of his magnificence, to
which he was chiefly incited by a principle of charity, and regard to
the public good. At _Rosny_, he raised that fine terrace, which runs
along the Seine, to a prodigious extent, and those great gardens, filled
with groves, arbours, and grottos, with water-works. He embellished
_Sully_ with gardens, of which the plants were the finest in the world,
and with a canal, supplied with fresh water by the little river Sangle,
which he turned that way, and which is afterwards lost in the Loire. He
erected a machine to convey the water to all the basons and fountains,
of which the gardens are full. He enlarged the castle of _La Chapelle
d'Angillon_, and embellished it with gardens and terraces."

These gardens somewhat remind one of these lines, quoted by Barnaby
Gooche:

_Have fountaines sweet at hand, or mossie waters,
Or pleasaunt brooke, that passing through the meads, is sweetly seene._

That fine gardens delighted Sully, is e