These, and such facts, shew us by what labours and steps our present garden-wealth has been raised; and diffuse an interest over a number of places familiar to us. Go, indeed, into what part of the island we will, we find some object of attraction and curiosity in the gardens attached to our old houses. As the coach passes the residence of Colonel Howard, at Leven’s Bridge in Westmoreland, it stops, the passengers get out, and mount upon its top, and there behold a fine old Elizabethan house, standing in the midst of a garden of that age, with all its topiary-work, its fountains, statues, and lawns. At Stonyhurst in Lancashire, now a Jesuit’s College, I was delighted to find a beautiful old garden of this description, which I have elsewhere described; and at Margam Abbey in South Wales, I found a fine assemblage of orange trees, the very trees which Sir Henry Wotton sent from Italy as a present to James I. These trees had been thrown ashore here by the wreck of the vessel, and the owner of the place, by the king’s permission, built a splendid orangery to receive them, which stood in the centre of a garden surrounded on three sides by woody hills; and in which fuchsias, at least ten feet high, with stems thick as a man’s arm, were growing in the open air, and tulip-trees large as the forest trees around. But what gave a still greater charm to this garden was, that the ruins of a fine old abbey stood here and there on its lawn; arches, overgrown with bushes, and the graceful pillars of a noble chapter-house, around whose feet lay stones of ancient tombs and curious sculpture. These are the things which give so delicious a variety to our English gardens: and when we bear in mind that many of those artifices and figures which we have been accustomed to treat with contempt as _Dutch_, are in reality _Roman_; that such things once stood in the magnificent gardens of Lucullus and Sallust; that the Romans gathered them again from the Eastern nations; that they are not only classical, but that, like many of the rites of our church and religious festivals, they are the reliques of the most ancient times, I think we shall be inclined to regard them with a greater degree of interest--not as objects to imitate or to place in any competition with our own more natural style, but as things which are of the most remote antiquity, and give a curious diversity to our country abodes. For my part, when I see even a fantastic peacock spreading its tail in yew in some old cottage or farm-house garden I think of Pliny and his admiration of such topiary-work, and would not have it cut down for the world. Even those summer-houses built in trees, such as that built by the King of Belgium, in Winter-Down wood, near Claremont; a sketch of which is presented in the title-page--were Roman fancies; were formed, Pliny tells us, amid the branches of any monarch trees that grew within their grounds, and that even Caligula had one in a plane-tree, near his villa at Velitræ,