A garden, after all, is an artificial thing; and though formed from the materials of nature, may be allowed to mould them into something very different from nature. There is a wild beauty of nature, and there is a beauty in nature linked to art: one looks for a very different kind of beauty in fields and mountains, to what one does in a garden. The one delights you by a certain rude freedom and untamed magnificence; the other, by smoothness and elegance--by velvet lawns, bowery arbours, winding paths, fair branching shrubs, fountains, and juxta-position of many rare flowers. It appears to me that it is an inestimable advantage as it regards our gardens, that the former taste of the nation has differed so much from its present one. Without this, what a loss of variety we should have suffered! If the taste of the present generation had been that of all past ages, what could there have been in the gardens of our past kings, nobles, and historical characters to mark them as strongly and emphatically as they are now marked? They now, indeed, seem to belong to men and things gone by; and I would as soon almost see one of our venerable cathedrals rased with the ground, as one of those old gardens rooted up. There is something in them of a sombre and becoming melancholy. They are in keeping with the houses they surround, and the portraits in the galleries of those houses. When we wander through the pleached alleys, and by the time-stained fountains of these old gardens, perished years indeed seem to come back again to us. In the centre of some vast avenue of majestic elms or limes, sweeping their boughs to the ground, “the dial-stone aged and green” arrests our attention, and points not to the present hour, but to the past. Our historic memories are intimately connected with such places. Our Howards, Essexes, Surreys, and Wolseys, were the magnificent founders and creators of such places; and in such, Shakspeare and Spenser, Milton and Bacon, and Sidney mused. It is astonishing what numbers of our poets, philosophers, and literati, are connected with the history of our gardens by their writings, or love of them. Sir Henry Wotton, Parkinson, Ray, John Evelyn, Sir Walter Raleigh, Bacon, Addison, Pope, Sir William Temple, who not only wrote “the Garden of Epicurus,” but so delighted in gardening that he directed in his will that his heart should be buried beneath the sun-dial in his garden at Moor-Park in Surrey, where it accordingly was deposited in a silver box: Horace Walpole, Locke, Cowley, Shenstone, Charles Cotton, Waller, Bishop Fleetwood, Spence, the author of Polymetis, Gilpin of the Forest Scenery, Mason, Dr. Darwin, Cowper, and many others, have their fame linked to the history or the love of gardens.