Ornamental gardening had hardly showed its graceful head; the little that had been done of this in England, was only in imitation of the Italian school, though without their accompaniments of splendid architecture, classical sculpture, and costly fountains. Such a style, in the near neighbourhood of a palace or mansion, is imposing and suitable, but the outskirts of such gardens, which should have been gradually blended with and into the free and beautiful forms of nature, were bounded and deformed by tortuous labyrinths, by complicated folds of nicely-clipped hedges, involving each other for no purpose than affording seclusion from the “licentious eye,” or a “maze to the intruding foot.” It may be observed as somewhat unaccountable, the excellent taste of their landscape painters was never transferred from the canvass to their style of ornamental gardening. But so it was: the people who had all kinds of assistance from artists of the first order, and from classical and picturesque association within their own territory, long remained blind to what was so natural and so manifestly within their reach! In useful and profitable gardening, the fine climate of Italy gave great facility for successful cultivation of a profusion of the finest fruits, and being an advanced post for the reception of all valuable plants from both Asia and Africa, it much sooner than other European countries possessed culinary vegetables in great variety, and of salad-herbs a numerous list. From the commencement of the sixteenth century the improvements in gardening began to take the form of a system. The increasing splendour of the English court, during the reigns of the virgin queen and her father, and the princely establishments of some of her courtiers, called the art of gardening into notice and repute, and gave an impulse to the yet dormant powers of horticultural practicability. Continental artists were generally employed in laying out the greater works. The sum of their professional ability was chiefly geometrical, an exact knowledge of straight lines, squares, and curves; they could line out a polygonal basin to a hair’s breadth, and construct a many-tiered jet d’eau in the midst. Such, however, were the principal features admitted into, and which constituted the style of those days, and continued through that and the succeeding [p267] century. In the latter (the seventeenth), and during the domestic broils which then convulsed the kingdoms, gardening appears to have been, as to style, almost stationary. In the mean time, however, the Reformation had been silently working salutary effects, not only in the deliverance of men from a servile religious thraldom, but also from the dogmas of precedential custom, and by imbuing them with a spirit of independence with respect to others, gave, what was better, a _self-dependence_ in exertion, whether of mind or action; and, after a few years of revolutionary