pages as the living parterres of a garden, and
their bright imageries as fascinating flowers. As we journeyed onward
through the busy herds of crowded cities, we learned the holier
influences of gardens in reflecting that a garden has been the scene of
man's birth--his fall--and proffered redemption.

It would be difficult to find a subject which has been more fervently
treated by poets and philosophers, than the _love of gardens_. In old
Rome, poets sung of their gardens. Ovid is so fond of flowers, that in
his account of the Rape of Proserpine, in his Fasti, he devotes several
lines to the enumeration of flowers gathered by her attendants. But the
passion for gardening, which evidently came from the East, never
prevailed much in Europe till the times of the religious orders, who
greatly improved it.

Our anecdotical recollections of the taste for gardens must be but few,
or they will carry us beyond our limits. Lord Bacon appears to have done
more towards their encouragement than any other writer, and his essay
on gardens is too well known to admit of quotation. Sir William Temple
has, however, many eloquent passages in his writings, in one of which he
calls _gardening_ the "inclination of kings, the choice of philosophers,
and the common favourite of public and private men; a pleasure of the
greatest, and the care of the meanest; and, indeed, an employment and a
possession, for which no man is too high or too low." Perhaps John
Evelyn did more than either of these philosophers. Temple's garden at
Moor Park was one of the most beautiful of its kind; but at the time
when Evelyn introduced ornamental gardening into England, there were no
examples for imitation. All was devised by his own active mind; and in
the political storms of his time, his garden and plantations became
subjects of popular conversation; while the intervals of his secession
from public life were filled up in writing several practical treatises
on his favourite science. At Wotton, in Surrey, may be seen the large,
enclosed flower-garden, which was to have formed one of the principal
objects in his "Elysium Britannicum;" and this idea has been partly
realized by one of his successors.

Andrew Marvell has, however, anathematized gardens with much severity,
in some lines entitled "The Mower against Gardens;" and commencing
thus:--

Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,
Did after him the world seduce,
And from the fields the flowers and pl