the mighty spirit of commerce, the thirst of discovery, and of traversing distant regions, which animate such numbers of our countrymen, and send them out to extend our geography, geology, and natural history, or to prosecute astronomical and philosophical science under every portion of the heavens? And besides these causes, how much is yet to be accounted for by the tastes of peculiar ages--out of the peculiar studies of the times, and the singular genius of particular men thence arising. The influence of poets and imaginative writers upon the character of our gardens has been extreme. Whether an age were poetical or mathematical, made a mighty difference in the garden-style of the time. C. Matius, the favourite of Augustus Cæsar, introduced the fashion at Rome of clipping trees into shapes of animals and other grotesque forms; Pliny admired the invention, and celebrated it under the name of topiary-work; and so strongly did it take hold on the spirits of men, that it descended to all the nations of Europe, and was not exploded by us till the last century. Sir Henry Wotton, the tasteful and poetical courtier of Queen Elizabeth, and ambassador of James to Venice, with notions of the fitness of a garden far beyond his age, yet thought it “_a graceful and natural conceit_” in Michael Angelo to make a fountain-figure in the shape of “a sturdy washerwoman, washing and winding of linen clothes, in which act she wrings out the water which made the fountain.” And again Addison, followed by Pope and Walpole, overturned this ancient fondness for pleached walks, and tonsured trees, and quaint fountain-figures, whether of Neptunes, Niles, or washerwomen. Then the great change of the social system, from the feudal and military to civil and domestic, produced a correspondent change in the culture of gardens. While the country was rent to pieces by contentions for the crown, there could be little leisure or taste for gardens; but when men became peaceful, and collected their habitations into clusters, they naturally began to embellish both them and their environs.