Part 36

That these flowers were the most favourite ones of Shakspeare, there can be little doubt--Perditta fondly calls them

----sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cytherea's breath.

When Petrarch first saw Laura: "elle avail une robe verte, sa coleur favorite, parsemée de violettes, la plus humble des fleurs."--Childe Harold thus paints this flower:

The sweetness of the violet's deep blue eyes (Kiss'd by the breath of heaven) seems colour'd by its skies.

One almost fancies one perceives Lord Bacon's attachment to gardens, or to rural affairs, even in the speech he made before the nobility, when first taking his seat in the High Court of Chancery; he hoped "that these same brambles that grow about justice, of needless charge and expence, and all manner of exactions, might be rooted out;" adding also, that immediate and "fresh justice was the sweetest." Mr. Mason, in a note to his English Garden, after paying a high compliment to Lord Bacon's picturesque idea of a garden, thus concludes that note:--"Such, when he descended to matters of more elegance (for, when we speak of Lord Bacon, to treat of these was to descend,) were the amazing powers of this universal genius."

Mr. Pope's delight in gardens, is visible even in the condensed allusion he makes to them, in a letter to Mr. Digby; "I have been above a month strolling about in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, from garden to garden, but still returning to Lord Cobham's, with fresh satisfaction. I should be sorry to see my Lady Scudamore's, till it has had the full advantage of Lord Bathurst's improvements."

A biographer thus speaks of the Prince de Ligne: "Quand les rois se reunirent a Vienne en 1814, ils se firent tous un devoir de l'accuellier avec distinction, et furent enchanté de la vivacité de son esprit, et de son intarissable gaieté, qui malgré ses infirmités et son grand âge, ne l'avoit pasencore abandonné. Ses saillies, et ses bon mots etoiént comme autrefois répétés pour tous." His generous heart thus speaks of the abused and unfortunate Marie Antoinette:--"The breath of calumny has not even respected the memory of the loveliest and best of women, of whose spotless heart and irreproachable conduct, no one can bear stronger evidence than I. Her soul was as pure as her face was fair; yet neither virtue nor beauty could save the victim of sanguinary liberty." In relating this (says his biographer), his voice faultered, and his eyes were suffused with tears. He thus briefly states, with his usual humour and vivacity, his conversation with Voltaire as to the garden at Ferney:

P. de L.--Monsieur, Monsieur, cela doit vous coupé beaucoup, quel charmant jardin!

Volt.--Oh! mon jardinier est un bête: c'est moi meme qui ait fait tout.

P. de L.--Je le croi.

Monsieur Thomas, in his eulogy of Descartes says, it should have been pronounced at the foot of Newton's statue: or rather, Newton himself should have been his panegyrist. Of this eulogy, Voltaire, in a most handsome letter to Mons. Thomas, thus speaks:--"votre ouvrage m'enchante d'un bout a l'autre, et Je vais le relire dès que J'aurai dicté ma lettre." The sleep and expanding of flowers are most interestingly reviewed by Mr. Loudon in p. 187 of his Encyclop., and by M. V. H. de Thury, in the above discourse, a few pages preceding his seducing description of the magnificent garden of M. de Boursault.

So late ago as the year 1804 it was proposed at Avignon, to erect an obelisk in memory of Petrarch, at Vaucluse: "il a été décidé, qu'on l'élevera, vis-avis l'ancien jardin de Petrache, lieu oû le lit de sorgue forme un angle."

This garden (as Mr. Walpole observes) was planted by the poet, enriched by him with the fairy gift of eternal summer.

Mr. Pope thus mentions the vines round this cave:--

Depending vines the shelving cavern skreen, With purple clusters blushing through the green.

Nearly eight pages of Mr. Loudon's Encyclop. are devoted to a very interesting research on the gardens of the Romans. Sir Joseph Banks has a paper on the Forcing Houses of the Romans, with a list of Fruits cultivated by them, now in our gardens, in vol. 1 of the Hort. Trans.

Dr. Pulteney gives a list of several manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, the writers of which are unknown, and the dates not precisely determined, but supposed to have been written, if not prior to the invention of printing, at least before the introduction of that art into England. I select the two following.--

No. 2543. De Arboribus, Aromatis, et Floribus.

No. 2562. Glossarium Latino-anglicum Arborum, Fructuum, Frugam, &c.

And he states the following from Bib. S. Petri Cant:--

No. 1695. Notabilia de Vegetabilibus, et Plantis.

Dr. Pulteney observes, that the above list might have been considerably extended, but that it would have unnecessarily swelled the article he was then writing.

The Nouv. Dict. Hist. mentions a personage whose attachment to his garden, and one of whose motives for cultivating that garden, does not deserve a notice:--"Attale III. Roi de Pergame, fils de Stratonice, soùlla la thrône en répandant le sang de ses amis et de sea parens. Il abandonna ensuite le soìn de ses affaires pour s'occuper entirement de son jardin. Il y cultivoit des poisons, tels que l'aconit et la ciguë, qu'il envoyoit quelque fois en présent a ses amis. Il mourut 133 ans avant Jesus Christ."

To have completed the various contrasting vicissitudes of this poor Suffolk farmer's life, he should have added to his other employments, those of another Suffolk man, the late W. Lomax, who had been grave-digger at the pleasant town of Bury St. Edmund's, for thirty-six years, and who, also, for a longer period than thirty-six years, had been a morrice-dancer at all the elections for that borough.

Gerarde, speaking of good sorts of apples and pears, thus mentions the above named Pointer:--"Master Richard Pointer has them all growing in his ground at Twickenham, near London, who is a most cunning and curious grafter and planter of all manner of rare fruits; and also in the ground of an excellent grafter and painful planter, Master Henry Bunbury, of Touthil-street, near unto Westminster; and likewise in the ground of a diligent and most affectionate lover of plants, Master Warner, neere Horsely Down, by London; and in divers other grounds about London."

The fate of this poor man reminds one of what is related of Corregio:--"He received from the mean canons of Parma, for his Assumption of the Virgin, the small pittance of two hundred livres, and it was paid him in copper. He hastened with the money to his starving family; but as he had six or eight miles to travel from Parma, the weight of his burden, and the heat of the climate, added to the oppression of his breaking heart, a pleurisy attacked him, which, in three days, terminated his existence and his sorrows in his fortieth year."

If one could discover a portrait of either of the authors mentioned in the foregoing list, one might, I think, inscribe under each of such portraits, these verses:

Ce pourtrait et maint liure Par le peintre et l'escrit, Feront reuoir et viure Ta face et ton esprit.