"With passages in plays other than 'The Dream,' Bacon has also parallels. His essay happens to have been published exactly twelve months after the production of 'A Winter's Tale' at Court, and in his somewhat arid enumeration therein of the seasonal succession of flowering plants, we seem to hear echoes of those exquisite verses in Perdita's speeches--the most beautiful expression of the intimate love of flowers in all literature-- "... Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried ere they can behold Bright Phœbus in his strength. "'For March,' writes Bacon, 'there come violets, especially the single blue, which are the earliest ... and which, above all other flowers, yields the sweetest smell in the air; also the yellow daffodil.' 'Lilies of all sorts, the flowre-de-luce being one,' says Perdita. 'Flower-de-Luces, and lilies of all natures,' echoes Bacon. "Near the Wild Bank later on there may, perhaps, be planted some of those specimens of the topiary art, which were so general in Jacobean gardens. Even Bacon would admit them into his 'Princely Garden.' 'Little low hedges (of box or yew),' he writes, 'round like welts, with some pretty pyramids, I like well, and in some places fair columns.' But he would confine them to geometric patterns: 'I, for my part, do not like images cut out in juniper or other garden stuff, they be for children.' But then Shakespeare had children and grandchildren; and, besides, many children of the present day will visit his garden, much taken, we may be sure, with such curious devices, and delighting in our simple sweet old English flowers--very few of them, it is to be hoped, serious little prigs, bursting with botany.... THE "KNOTT GARDEN" "It is now necessary to say a few words about the 'Knott Garden'--an enclosure which, being an invariable adjunct to every house of importance in Shakespeare's time, is the most essential part of the reconstruction, on Elizabethan lines, of the ground about New Place. It need not, however, engage us long: for M. Forestier's beautiful drawing of it represents it as it is to be, better than any amount of wordy description.