1300, and might afford an interesting
comparison to those who are acquainted with its present state. That
state indeed in many parts of Italy displays no symptoms of decline. But
whatever mysterious influence of soil or climate has scattered the seeds
of death on the western regions of Tuscany, had not manifested itself in
the middle ages. Among uninhabitable plains, the traveller is struck by
the ruins of innumerable castles and villages, monuments of a time when
pestilence was either unfelt, or had at least not forbad the residence
of mankind. Volterra, whose deserted walls look down upon that tainted
solitude, was once a small but free republic; Siena, round whom, though
less depopulated, the malignant influence hovers, was once almost the
rival of Florence. So melancholy and apparently irresistible a decline
of culture and population through physical causes, as seems to have
gradually overspread that portion of Italy, has not perhaps been
experienced in any other part of Europe, unless we except Iceland.

[Sidenote: Gardening.]

The Italians of the fourteenth century seem to have paid some attention
to an art, of which, both as related to cultivation and to architecture,
our own forefathers were almost entirely ignorant. Crescentius dilates
upon horticulture, and gives a pretty long list of herbs both esculent
and medicinal.[711] His notions about the ornamental department are
rather beyond what we should expect, and I do not know that his scheme
of a flower-garden could be much amended. His general arrangements,
which are minutely detailed with evident fondness for the subject, would
of course appear too formal at present; yet less so than those of
subsequent times; and though acquainted with what is called the topiary
art, that of training or cutting trees into regular figures, he does not
seem to run into its extravagance. Regular gardens, according to Paulmy,
were not made in France till the sixteenth or even seventeenth
century;[712] yet one is said to have existed at the Louvre, of much
older construction.[713] England, I believe, had nothing of the
ornamental kind, unless it were some trees regularly disposed in the
orchard of a monastery. Even the common horticultural art for culinary
purposes, though not entirely neglected, since the produce of gardens is
sometimes mentioned in ancient deeds, had not been cultivated with much
attention.[714] The esculent vegetables now most in use were introduced
in the re