Flowers And Flower-Gardens Part 37

[030] Catherine the Second grossly disgraced herself as a woman--partly driven into misconduct herself by the behaviour of her husband--but as a sovereign it cannot be denied that she exhibited a penetrating sagacity and great munificence; and perhaps the lovers of literature and science should treat her memory with a little consideration. When Diderot was in distress and advertized his library for sale, the Empress sent him an order on a banker at Paris for the amount demanded, namely fifteen thousand livres, on condition that the library was to be left as a deposit with the owner, and that he was to accept a gratuity of one thousand livres annually for taking charge of the books, until the Empress should require them. This was indeed a delicate and ingenious kindness. Lord Brougham makes D'Alembert and not Diderot the subject of this anecdote. It is a mistake. See the Correspondence of Baron de Gumm and Diderot with the Duke of Saxe-Gotha.

Many of the Russian n.o.bles keep up to this day the taste in gardening introduced by Catherine the Second, and have still many gardens laid out in the English style. They have often had in their employ both English and Scottish gardeners. There is an anecdote of a Scotch gardener in the Crimea in one of the public journals:--

"Our readers"--says the _Banffs.h.i.+re Journal_--"will recollect that when the Allies made a brief expedition to Yalto, in the south of the Crimea, they were somewhat surprised and gratified by the sight of some splendid gardens around a seat of Prince Woronzow. Little did our countrymen think that these gardens were the work of a Scotchman, and a Moray loon; yet such was the case." The history of the personage in question is a somewhat singular one: "Jamie Sinclair, the garden boy, had a natural genius, and played the violin. Lady c.u.mming had this boy educated by the family tutor, and sent him to London, where he was well known in 1836-7-8, for his skill in drawing and colouring. Mr. Knight, of the Exotic Nursery, for whom he used to draw orchids and new plants, sent him to the Crimea, to Prince Woronzow, where he practised for thirteen years. He had laid out these beautiful gardens which the allies the other day so much admired; had the care of 10,000 acres of vineyards belonging to the prince; was well known to the Czar, who often consulted him about improvements, and gave him a "medal of merit" and a diploma or pa.s.sport, by which he was free to pa.s.s from one end of the empire to the other, and also through Austria and Prussia, I have seen these instruments. He returned to London in 1851, and was just engaged with a London publisher for a three years' job, when Menschikoff found the Turks too hot for him last April twelve-month; the Russians then made up for blows, and Mr. Sinclair was more dangerous for them in London than Lord Aberdeen. He was the only foreigner who was ever allowed to see all that was done in and out of Sebastopol, and over all the Crimea. The Czar, however, took care that Sinclair could not join the allies; but where he is and what he is about I must not tell, until the war is over--except that he is not in Russia, and that he will never play first fiddle again in Morays.h.i.+re."

[031] Brown succeeded to the popularity of Kent. He was nicknamed, _Capability Brown_, because when he had to examine grounds previous to proposed alterations and improvements he talked much of their _capabilities_. One of the works which are said to do his memory most honor, is the Park of Nuneham, the seat of Lord Harcourt. The grounds extend to 1,200 acres. Horace Walpole said that they contained scenes worthy of the bold pencil of Rubens, and subjects for the tranquil suns.h.i.+ne of Claude de Lorraine. The following inscription is placed over the entrance to the gardens.

Here universal Pan, Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance, Leads on the eternal Spring.

It is said that the _gardens_ at Nuneham were laid out by Mason, the poet.

[032] Mrs. Stowe visited the Jardin Mabille in the Champs Elysees, a sort of French Vauxhall, where small jets of gas were so arranged as to imitate "flowers of the softest tints and the most perfect shape."

[033] Napoleon, it is said, once conceived the plan of roofing with gla.s.s the gardens of the Tuileries, so that they might be used as a winter promenade.

[034] Addison in the 477th number of the _Spectator_ in alluding to Kensington Gardens, observes; "I think there are as many kinds of gardening as poetry; our makers of parterres and flower gardens are epigrammatists and sonnetteers in the art; contrivers of bowers and grottos, treillages and cascades, are romance writers. Wise and London are our heroic poets; and if I may single out any pa.s.sage of their works to commend I shall take notice of that part in the upper garden at Kensington, which was at first nothing but a gravel pit. It must have been a fine genius for gardening that could have thought of forming such an unsightly hollow unto so beautiful an area and to have hit the eye with so uncommon and agreeable a scene as that which it is now wrought into."

[035] Lord Bathurst, says London, informed Daines Barrington, that _he_ (Lord Bathurst) was the first who deviated from the straight line in sheets of water by following the lines in a valley in widening a brook at Ryskins, near Colnbrook; and Lord Strafford, thinking that it was done from poverty or economy asked him to own fairly how little more it would have cost him to have made it straight. In these days no possessor of a park or garden has the water on his grounds either straight or square if he can make it resemble the Thames as described by Wordsworth:

The river wanders at its own sweet will.

Horace Walpole in his lively and pleasant little work on Modern Gardening almost antic.i.p.ates this thought. In commending Kent's style of landscape-gardening he observes: "_The gentle stream was taught to serpentize at its pleasure."_

[036] This Palm-house, "the glory of the gardens," occupies an area of 362 ft. in length; the centre is an hundred ft. in width and 66 ft. in height.

It must charm a Native of the East on a visit to our country, to behold such carefully cultured specimens, in a great gla.s.s-case in England, of the trees called by Linnaeus "the Princes of the vegetable kingdom," and which grow so wildly and in such abundance in every corner of Hindustan.

In this conservatory also are the banana and plantain. The people of England are in these days acquainted, by touch and sight, with almost all the trees that grow in the several quarters of the world. Our artists can now take sketches of foreign plants without crossing the seas. An allusion to the Palm tree recals some criticisms on Shakespeare's botanical knowledge.

"Look here," says _Rosalind_, "what I found on a palm tree." "A palm tree in the forest of Arden," remarks Steevens, "is as much out of place as a lioness in the subsequent scene." Collier tries to get rid of the difficulty by suggesting that Shakespeare may have written _plane tree_.

"Both the remark and the suggestion," observes Miss Baker, "might have been spared if those gentlemen had been aware that in the counties bordering on the Forest of Arden, the name of an exotic tree is transferred to an indigenous one." The _salix caprea_, or goat-willow, is popularly known as the "palm" in Northamptons.h.i.+re, no doubt from having been used for the decoration of churches on Palm Sunday--its graceful yellow blossoms, appearing at a time when few other trees have put forth a leaf, having won for it that distinction. Clare so calls it:--

"Ye leaning palms, that seem to look Pleased o'er your image in the brook."

That Shakespeare included the willow in his forest scenery is certain, from another pa.s.sage in the same play:--

"West of this place, down in the neighbour bottom.

The _rank of osiers_ by the murmuring stream, Left on your right hand brings you to the place."

The customs and amus.e.m.e.nts of Northamptons.h.i.+re, which are frequently noticed in these volumes, were identical with those of the neighbouring county of Warwick, and, in like manner ill.u.s.trate very clearly many pa.s.sages in the great dramatist.--_Miss Baker's "Glossary of Northamptons.h.i.+re Words." (Quoted by the London Athenaeum_.)

[037] Mrs. Hemans once took up her abode for some weeks with Wordsworth at Rydal Mount, and was so charmed with the country around, that she was induced to take a cottage called _Dove's Nest_, which over-looked the lake of Windermere. But tourists and idlers so haunted her retreat and so worried her for autographs and Alb.u.m contributions, that she was obliged to make her escape. Her little cottage and garden in the village of Wavertree, near Liverpool, seem to have met the fate which has befallen so many of the residences of the poets. "Mrs. Hemans's little flower-garden" (says a late visitor) "was no more--but rank gra.s.s and weeds sprang up luxuriously; many of the windows were broken; the entrance gate was off its hinges: the vine in front of the house trailed along the ground, and a board, with '_This house to let_' upon it, was nailed on the door. I entered the deserted garden and looked into the little parlour--once so full of taste and elegance; it was gloomy and cheerless. The paper was spotted with damp, and spiders had built their webs in the corner. As I mused on the uncertainty of human life, I exclaimed with the eloquent Burke,--'What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!'"

The beautiful grounds of the late Professor Wilson at Elleray, we are told by Mr. Howitt in his interesting "_Homes and Haunts of the British Poets_" have also been sadly changed. "Steam," he says, "as little as time, has respected the sanct.i.ty of the poet's home, but has drawn its roaring iron steeds opposite to its gate and has menaced to rush through it and lay waste its charmed solitude. In plain words, I saw the stages of a projected railway running in an ominous line across the very lawn and before the windows of Elleray." I believe the whole place has been purchased by a Railway Company.

[038] In Churton's _Rail Book of England_, published about three years ago, Pope's Villa is thus noticed--"Not only was this temple of the Muses--this abode of genius--the resort of the learned and the wittiest of the land--levelled to the earth, but all that the earth produced to remind posterity of its ill.u.s.trious owner, and identify the dead with the living strains he has bequeathed to us, was plucked up by the roots and scattered to the wind." On the authority of William Hewitt I have stated on an earlier page that some splendid Spanish chesnut trees and some elms and cedars planted by Pope at Twickenham were still in existence. But Churton is a later authority. Howitt's book was published in 1847.

[039] _One would have thought &c._ See the garden of Armida, as described by Ta.s.so, C. xvi. 9, &c.

"In lieto aspetto il bel giardin s'aperse &c."

Here was all that variety, which const.i.tutes the nature of beauty: hill and dale, lawns and crystal rivers, &c.

"And, that which all faire works doth most aggrace, "The art, which all that wrought, appeared in no place."

Which is literally from Ta.s.so, C, xvi 9.

"E quel, che'l bello, e'l caro accresce a l'opre, "L'arte, che tutto fa, nulla si scopre."

The next stanza is likewise translated from Ta.s.so, C. xvi 10. And, if the reader likes the comparing of the copy with the original, he may see many other beauties borrowed from the Italian poet. The fountain, and the two bathing damsels, are taken from Ta.s.so, C. xv, st. 55, &c. which he calls, _Il fonte del riso_. UPTON.

[040] Cowper was evidently here thinking rather of Milton than of Homer.

_Flowers of all hue_, and without thorns the rose.

_Paradise Lost_.

Pope translates the pa.s.sage thus;

Beds of all various _herbs_, for ever green, In beauteous order terminate the scene.

Homer referred to pot-herbs, not to flowers of all hues. Cowper is generally more faithful than Pope, but he is less so in this instance.

In the above description we have Homer's highest conception of a princely garden:--in five acres were included an orchard, a vineyard, and some beds of pot-herbs. Not a single flower is mentioned, by the original author, though his translator has been pleased to steal some from the garden of Eden and place them on "the verge extreme" of the four acres. Homer of course meant to attach to a Royal residence as Royal a garden; but as Bacon says, "men begin to build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection." The mansion of Alcinous was of brazen walls with golden columns; and the Greeks and Romans had houses that were models of architecture when their gardens exhibited no traces whatever of the hand of taste.

[041]

_And over him, art stryving to compayre With nature, did an arber greene dispied_

This whole episode is taken from Ta.s.so, C. 16, where Rinaldo is described in dalliance with Armida. The bower of bliss is her garden

"Stimi (si misto il culto e col negletto) "Sol naturali e gli ornamenti e i siti, "Di natura arte par, che per diletto "L'imitatrice sua scherzando imiti."

See also Ovid, _Met_ iii. 157

"Cujus in extremo est antrum nemorale necessu, "Arte laboratum nulla, simulaverat artem "Ingenio natura fuo nam pumice vivo, "Et lenibus tophis nativum duxerat arc.u.m "Fons sonat a dextra, tenui perlucidas unda "Margine gramineo patulos incinctus hiatus"

UPTON

If this pa.s.sage may be compared with Ta.s.so's elegant description of Armida's garden, Milton's _pleasant grove_ may vie with both.[141] He is, however, under obligations to the sylvan scene of Spenser before us.

Mr. J.C. Walker, to whom the literature of Ireland and of Italy is highly indebted, has mentioned to me his surprise that the writers on modern gardening should have overlooked the beautiful pastoral description in this and the two following stanzas.[142] It is worthy a place, he adds, in the Eden of Milton. Spenser, on this occasion, lost sight of the "trim gardens" of Italy and England, and drew from the treasures of his own rich imagination. TODD.

_And fast beside these trickled softly downe.

A gentle stream, &c._

Compare the following stanza in the continuation of the _Orlando Innamorato_, by Nilcolo degli Agostinti, Lib. iv, C. 9.

"Ivi e un mormorio a.s.sai soave, e ba.s.so, Che ogniun che l'ode lo fa addornientare, L'acqua, ch'io dissi gia per entro un sa.s.so E parea che dicesse nel sonare.

Vatti riposa, ormai sei stanco, e la.s.so, E gli augeletti, che s'udian cantare, Ne la dolce armonia par che ogn'un dica, Deh vien, e dormi ne la piaggia, aprica,"

Spenser's obligations to this poem seem to have escaped the notice of his commentators. J.C. WALKER.