In the old days there was probably a parterre at Melbourne, now no longer existing. The figures of kneeling slaves were possibly the centre ornaments of its two divisions, on what is now the upper lawn. This portion of the garden is rather liberally, and perhaps somewhat injudiciously, planted with a mixture of conifers, put in probably thirty to forty years ago, when the remains of good old garden designs were not so reverently treated, nor their value so well understood, as now. Some of this planting has even strayed to the banks of the Great Water. The pleasure ground of Melbourne is a precious relic of the past, and, even though the ill effects of the modern planting of various conifers may be less generally conspicuous there than it is in many places, yet it is distinctly an intrusion. The tall trees inclosed by massive yew hedges, the pools and fountains, the statues and other sculptured ornaments, all recall, with their special character of garden treatment, the times and incidents that Watteau loved to paint. Such a picture as his _Bosquet de Bacchus_, so well known by the engraving, with its gaily-dressed groups of young men and maidens seated in the grassy shade and making the music of their lutes and voices accompany that of the fountains’ waters, might have been painted at Melbourne. For here are the same wide, green-walled alleys, the pools, the fountains and the ornamental details of the great gardens of courtly France of two hundred years ago acclimatised on English soil; not in the dreary vastness of Versailles, but tamed to our climate’s needs and on a scale attuned to the more moderate dimensions of a reasonable human dwelling. BERKELEY CASTLE This venerable pile, one of the oldest continuously-inhabited houses in England, stands upon a knoll of rising ground at the southern end of the tract of rich alluvial land known as the Vale of Berkeley, that stretches away for ten miles or more north-eastward in the direction of Gloucester. Within two miles to the west is the Severn, already a mile across and rapidly widening to its estuary. On the side of the higher ground the town creeps up to the shelter of the Castle and the grand old church, on the lower is a level stretch of water-meadow. Seen from the meadows some half-mile away it looks like some great fortress roughly hewn out of natural rock. Nature would seem to have taken back to herself the masses of stone reared by man seven and a half centuries ago.