to say everything that such a seeker, such a
discoverer, as Mr. Parsons finds--the less that the purpose of these
limited remarks is to hint at our own _trouvailles_. A view of the
field, at any rate, would be incomplete without such specimens as the
three charming oil-pictures which commemorate Holme Lacey. There are
gardens and gardens, and these represent the sort that are always spoken
of in the plural and most arrogate the title. They form, in England, a
magnificent collection, and if they abound in a quiet assumption of the
grand style it must be owned that they frequently achieve it. There are
people to be found who enjoy them, and it is not, at any rate, when Mr.
Parsons deals with them that we have an opening for strictures. As
we look at the blaze of full summer in the brilliantly conventional
parterres we easily credit the tale of the 40,000 plants it takes to
fill the beds. More than this, we like the long paths of turf that
stretch between splendid borders, recalling the frescoed galleries of a
palace; we like the immense hedges, whose tops are high against the sky.
While we are liking, we like perhaps still better, since they deal with
a very different order, the two water-colors from the dear little garden
at Winchelsea--especially the one in which the lady takes he ease in her
hammock (on a sociable, shady terrace, from which the ground drops),
and looks at red Rye, across the marshes. Another garden where a
contemplative hammock would be in order is the lovely canonical plot
at Salisbury, with the everlasting spire above it tinted in the summer
sky--unless, in the same place, you should choose to hook yourself up by
the grassy bank of the Avon, at the end of the lawn, with the meadows,
the cattle, the distant willows across the river, to look at.

Three admirable water-colors are devoted by Mr. Parsons to the
perceptible dignity of Gravetye, in Sussex, the dignity of very serious
gardens, entitled to ceremonious consideration, Few things in England
can show a greater wealth of bloom than the wide flowery terrace
immediately beneath the gray, gabled house, where tens of thousands of
tea-roses, in predominant possession, have, in one direction, a mass
of high yews for a background. They divide their province with the
carnations and pansies: a wilder ness of tender petals ignorant of
anything rougher than the neighborhood of the big unchanged medley of
tall yuccas and saxifrage, with miscellaneous filling-i