that carries the great quadrangle of Chatsworth Palace and its flanking artificialities of rock and garden, like a black patch upon the face of a fine woman of Charles's court. This brings us upon our line of march again. Charles II. loved stiff gardens; James II. loved stiff gardens; and William, with his Low-Country tastes, out-stiffened both, with his "topiary box a-row." Lord Bacon has commended the formal style to public admiration by his advocacy and example. The lesson was repeated at Cashiobury by the most noble the Earl of Essex (of whom Evelyn writes,--"My Lord is not illiterate beyond the rate of most noblemen of his age"). So also that famous garden of Moor-Park in Hertfordshire, laid out by the witty Duchess of Bedford, to whom Dr. Donne addresses some of his piquant letters, was a model of old-fashioned and stately graces. Sir William Temple praises it beyond reason in his "Garden of Epicurus," and cautions readers against undertaking any of those irregularities of garden-figures which the Chinese so much affect. He admires only stateliness and primness. "Among us," he says, "the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly in some certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformities; our Walks and our Trees ranged so as to answer one another, and at exact Distances." From all these it is clear what was the garden-drift of the century. Even Waller, the poet,--whose moneys, if he were like most poets, could not be thrown away idly,--spent a large sum in levelling the hills about his rural home at Beaconsfields. (We shall find a different poet and treatment by-and-by in Shenstone.) Only Milton, speaking from the very arcana of the Puritan rigidities, breaks in upon these geometric formalities with the rounded graces of the garden which he planted in Eden. There "the crisped brooks, Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold With mazy error under pendent shades, Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain." Going far behind all conventionalities, he credited to Paradise--the ideal of man's happiest estate--variety, irregularity, profusion, luxuriance; and to the fallen estate, precision, formality, and an inexorable Art, which, in place of concealing, glorified itself. In the next century, when Milton comes to be illustrated by Addison and the rest, we shall find gardens of a different style from those of Waller and of Hampton Court. And now from some look-out point near to the close of the seventeenth century, when John Evelyn, in his age, is repairing the damages that Peter the Great has wrought in his pretty Deptford home, let us take a bird's-eye glance at rural England.