In the present day it is somewhat difficult to account for the designer’s attitude of mind when deciding on such a lavish employment of the obelisk-shaped finials. One can only regard it as the outcome of the taste or fashion of the day, when he borrowed straight from the Italians everything except their marvellous discernment. One accepts the many obelisks at Montacute as showing the reflection of Italian influence on the Tudor mind; to-day and new, they would be inadmissible. The modern mind, with the vast quantity of material at hand, and the easy access to all that has been said and done on the subject, should [Illustration: MONTACUTE: SUNFLOWERS FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF MR. E. C. AUSTEN LEIGH] accept nothing but the best and purest in this as in any other branch of fine art. There is one other possible way of accounting for the prevalence of these all-pervading obelisks. The name of the place is taken from a conical wooded hill (_mons acutus_). The same play on a word, a favourite fashion of Elizabethan times, and a custom in heraldry from a remoter antiquity, is seen in the shield of the ancient Montacute family, where the three sharp peaks denote that the surname had the same origin. The connexion of this name with the acute peak or obelisk form would therefore the more readily commend itself to the Elizabethan mind. The house has never gone into other hands, the present owner, Mr. W. R. Phelips, being the descendant of the founder. RAMSCLIFFE It would seem to be a law that the purest and truest human pleasure in a garden is attained by means whose ratio is exactly inverse to the scale or degree of the garden’s magnificence. The design, for instance, of a Versailles impresses one with a sense of ostentatious consciousness of magnitude; out of scale with living men and women; whose lives could only be adapted to it, as we know they were, by an existence full of artificial restraints and discomforts; the painful and arbitrarily imposed conditions of a tyrannical and galling etiquette. So we think also of our greatest gardens, such as Chatsworth. It is visited by a large number of people who go to see it as a large expensive place to gape at, but surely not for the truest love of a garden. So it is with many a large place; the size and grandeur of the garden may suit the great house as a design; it may be imposing and costly, it may be beautifully kept, and yet it may lack all the qualities that are needed for simple pleasure and refreshment. It is not till we come to some old garden of moderate size that has always been cherished and has never been radically altered, that the true message of the garden can be received and read; and it is from thence downward in the scale of grandeur that we find those gardens that are the happiest and best of all for true delight and close companionship; the simple borders of hardy flowers, planted and tended with constant watchfulness and loving care by the owner’s own hands.