The walls supporting the terraces served another purpose than that of sustaining the roots of trees and flowers on the stages; as rain fell on the terraces, it exuded between the joints of the stones and nourished a fairy world of lichen, moss, and ferns. This was the wall shaded by the yews. The other was hugged and laughed over by roses, honeysuckle, and wisteria. We have got almost no gardens left in England in their primitive condition, only the wreckage of their beauty. But, as the old woman said who sniffed the empty amphora of old Falernian wine, "If what remains be so good, what must you have been when full!" Now let us see what Horace Walpole tells us of the devastation of these beautiful old gardens. "No succeeding generation," he says, "in an opulent and luxurious country contents itself with the perfection established by its ancestors; more perfect perfection was still sought, and improvements had gone on, till London and Wise had stocked all our gardens with giants, animals, monsters, coats of arms and mottoes, in yew, box, and holly. Bridgman, the next fashionable designer of gardens, was far more chaste--he banished verdant sculpture, and did not even revert to the square precision of the foregoing age. He enlarged his plans, disdained to make every division tally to its opposite, and though he still adhered much to straight walks with high-clipped hedges, they were only his great lines; the rest he diversified by wilderness, and with loose groves of oak, though still within surrounding hedges. As his reformation gained footing, he ventured to introduce cultivated fields and even morsels of forest appearance, by the sides of those endless and tiresome walks. "But the capital stroke, the leading step to all that has followed,"--I shiver as I write these words,--"_was the destruction of walls for boundaries_, and the invention of fosses--an attempt then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Ha's! to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk. No sooner was this simple enchantment made, than levelling, mowing, and rolling followed. The contiguous ground of the park without the sunk fence was to be harmonized with the lawn within; and the garden in its turn was to be set free from its prim regularity, that it might assort with the wilder country without. At that moment appeared Kent, painter enough to taste the charms of landscape, bold and opinionative enough to dare and to dictate, and born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays."