he himself refers us in note 2, p. 215-and in the same page. I need not quote it here; for I cannot believe either that his own counter-statement will be thought by anybody but himself (and perhaps our reviewer) to be in itself credible; or that, if it were proved correct, it would be accepted by anybody else as a reason for concluding that the statement in the Declaration was not believed by its authors to be true.

The rest of the story of that day, as told in the Declaration, supplies Dr. Abbott with no more instances of suppression or misrepresentation. And having now gone patiently through his whole. collection, I still wait to hear of a single material circumstance in which the effect of the original depositions is misrepresented in the narrative put forth by Queen Elizabeth.

JAMES SPEDDING.

OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING.

IN these days a garden is an artificial production with which nature has as much to do as with the weaving of a Turkey carpet. The art of carpet-bedding has been carried to perfection, and in consequence we all know what to expect when we enter a flower-garden in the late summer months. There are the patches of scarlet, purple, and white, as smooth and even as the emerald turf in which they are embedded. There is not a withered leaf nor a straggling spray to be seen, for it is the gardener's first object to repress the luxuriance of nature, and it is part of his duty to go over the beds every morning to reduce them to the same trim and level uniformity. These brilliant patches of colour are embellished or relieved by a bordering of a sedum, which resembles the truncated head of an artichoke, but which has, for some unknown reason, been enrolled in the catalogue of ornamental plants. The ideal which our English gardeners strive to fulfil is to be found in the flower-beds of our London parks, and if they are able to imitate their model with more or less success, it matters little to them that the parterre which blazes into colour in July and August remains brown and barren for the greater part of the year. The tyranny of fashion has prevailed alike in the gardens of rich and poor, of the squire, the parson, and the farmer, and the delightful occupation of gardening is exalted, or as we think debased, to become a skilled art, in which there is no place for amateurs.

It was not so in the gardens of our youth, and over some of these the destroying hand has not yet passed. There was the stamp of character and all the charms of a surprise in the distinctive peculiarities of our old-fashioned walled gardens. One was famous for its peaches, sheltered from the early frosts by the thatched coping of its mud walls; another, for its wealth of golden-drop plums. In one there was a shady corner for lilies of the valley; in another a sunny exposure where the autumn violets were the first to bloom. In all there were grass alleys, crooked and hoary old apple-trees, valued as much for their age as for the quality of their fruit; there was a wealth and variety of pot-herbs, one wall was crowned by a patch of yellow sedum, another was fringed with wall-flowers, and the old bricks were often covered by a network of the delicate and beautiful creeper,

the mother of millions.' There was the delightful smell of newlyturned mould, to mingle with the fragrance of a hedge of sweet peas, or of a bed of clove gillyflowers. Sweetwilliam and mignonette filled the vacant spaces, and the bees from a row of straw hives were humming over all. It is sad to think that such gardens as we describe must almost be numbered among the things of the past.

This lament over the lost glories of our English gardens is suggested by the perusal of a rare and curious folio, published in 1629, which bears the following title :

Paradisi in Sole. Paradisus Terrestris. A Garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed up: with a Kitchen garden of all manner of herbs, raves and fruites, for meate or sause, used with us, and an Orchard of all sorte of fruitbearing Trees and Shrubbes fit for our Land, together with the right orderinge, planting and preserving of them, with their uses and vertues. Collected by John Parkinson, Apothecary of London, 1629.

'Qui veut paragonner l'artifice à Nature,
Et nos parcs à Eden, indiscret il mesure
Le pas de l'éléphant par le pas du ciron,
Et de l'aigle le vol par çi du mouscheron.'

This comprehensive title is printed on a small scutcheon, in order not to interfere with the quaint and elaborate representation of the Garden of Eden, which occupies the rest of the title-page. The tree of knowledge, its fruit still unplucked by Adam, appears in the centre of the plate. Adam is grafting an apple-tree; Eve, clothed only by her hair, is skipping airily downhill to pick up a pine-apple, and all sorts of flowers of wondrous proportions grow in the foreground. There is a tulip four times as big as Eve's head, and a cyclamen which is at least five feet high.

Parkinson dedicates his folio to the Queen, Henrietta Maria, not in the fulsome tone of adulation which we associate with dedications of that and succeeding ages, but rather as one conscious that he confers a favour in laying before her the fruit of so much labour and research. After giving good practical direction as to the site_of the garden and its soil, he furnishes the reader with geometrical designs for the beds, and advice as to the relative merits of borderings in tiles, lead, thrift, and box, and he then goes on

to furnish the inward parts and beds with those fine Flowers that (being strangers unto us, and giving the beauty and bravery of their colours so early before many of our owne bred flowers, the most to entice us to their delight) are most beseeming it: and namely with Daffodils, Fritillaries, Jacinthes, Saffron-flowers, Lillies, Flowerdeluces, Tulipas, Anemones, French Cowslips or Beareseares, and a number of such other flowers, very beautifull, delightfull, and pleasant, whereof although many have little sweete sent to commend them, yet their earlinesse and exceeding great beautie and varietie doth so farre countervaile that defect (and yet I must tell you withall that there is among the many sorts of them some, and that not a few, that doe excell in sweetnesse, being so strong and heady, that they rather offend by too much than by too little sent, and some again are of so mild and VOL. VII.-No. 35.

K

moderate temper, that they scarce come short of your most delicate and daintiest flowers) that they are almost in all places with all persons, especially with the better sort of the Gentry of the Land, as greatly desired and accepted as any other the most choisest, and the rather, for that the most part of these Out-landish flowers doe show forth their beauty and colours so early in the yeare that they seem to make a Garden of delight even in the Winter time, and doe so give their flowers one after another, that all their bravery is not spent until that Gilliflowers, the pride of English Gardens, do shew themselves.

It is in this succession of flowering plants that modern gardening so signally fails, not from lack of knowledge, but from a senseless desire to concentrate the whole display into two short months of the year.

Our author declares that there are almost a hundred sorts of Daffodils, and by the way' inveighs against the

many idle and ignorant Gardiners and others who get names by stealth, as they doe many other things, and doe call some of these Daffodils Narcisses, when as all know that know any Latine, that Narcisses is the Latine name, and Daffodil the English of one and the same thing, and therefore alone without any other Epithite cannot distinguish several things. I would willingly therefore that all would grow judicious, and call everything by his proper English name in speaking English, or else by such Latine name as everything hath that hath not a proper English name, that thereby they may distinguish the several varieties of things, and not confound them.

甫

We scarcely share his enthusiasm for tulips, in spite of his as sertion that there is no Lady or Gentlewoman of any worth that is not caught with this delight, or not delighted with these flowers ;' but we fully agree with the sentiment that i'o si punti a

the Anemones likewise or Windeflowers are so full of variety and so dainty, so pleasant and so delightsome flowers, that the sight of them doth enforce an earnest longing desire in the minde of anyone to be a possessour of some of them at the leaste: For without all doubt this one kind of flower, so variable in colours, so differing in form (being almost as many sortes of them double as single), so plentifull in bearing flowers, and so durable in lasting, and also so easie both to preserve and to encrease, is of itselfe alone almost sufficient to furnish a garden with flowers for almost half the yeare.

Parkinson goes on to commend double poppies, 'flowers of a great and goodly proportion;' double daisies, which are common enough in every garden;' French marigolds, with their strong, heady sent, and glorious shew for colour;' sweetwilliams and sweetjohns, hollihocks, and double and single peonies-in short, all the commoner and more showy flowers which still linger in our cottage gardens. He declares carnations and gillyflowers to be the Queene, of delight and of flowers,' and enumerates more than a dozen varieties by names which are probably no longer known to florists. Roses have been more modified by culture within the last two hundred years than any other of our garden flowers. Those described by Parkinson were for the most part single roses, or with only two rows of petals and of small diameter. They seem to have been varieties of

the damask and briar-roses, and the cabbage and moss-roses which we consider old-fashioned find no place in the list.

Not content to deny that single flowers can be transformed into double by the observation of the change of the Moone, the constellations or conjunctions of Planets or some other Starres or celestial bodies,' Parkinson holds that such transformation could not be effected by the art of man.

If it shall bee demanded, From whence then came these double flowers that we have, if they were not so made by art, I answer that assuredly all such flowers did first grow wilde, and were soe found double as they doe now grow in Gardens, but for how long before they were found they became double no man can tell; we onely have them as nature has produced them, and so they remaine.

In these introductory chapters, among other desultory matter, he gives a recipe for the destruction of

earwickes, a most infestuous vermin. . . . Some have used old shooes and such like hollow things to take them in, or else beasts' hoofes, which being turned downe upon stickes' ends set into the ground, or into the pots of earth, will soon drawe into them many Earwickes, lying hid therein from sunne, winde, and raine, and by care and diligence may soon bee destroyed, if every morning and evening one take the hoofes gently off the stickes, and knocking them against the ground in a plain allie, shake out all the Earwickes that are crept into them, which quickly with one's foot may be trode to peeces.

Parkinson next goes on to describe his garden flowers in detail, in many cases giving a list of more varieties than we suspect are to be found in our modern gardens, and also under names by which they are not now known. The snowdrop, for instance, is termed a bulbous violet.' The iris is flowerdeluce,' and he gives an illustration of the 'great Turkie Flowerdeluce,' in which it is shown to be a much larger and handsomer flower than the blue flags which we now cultivate. The gladiolus, in defiance of all natural classification, is represented in the same plate with the bee and butterfly orchis, and with the dog-tooth violet; but on the whole the broad distinctions of the natural families are respected.

6

Under the head of Vertues,' which follows the description of each plant, some curious gleanings might be made. Parkinson, as a licensed apothecary, speaks with a certain lofty incredulity of the physicall vertues' ascribed to many plants, but he does not always disdain an old-wives' recipe, as, for instance, when speaking of the Lilly Convally' (lily of the valley).

The flowers of the white kinde are often used with those things that help to strengthen the memory, and to procure ease to Apoplectick persons. Camerarius setteth downe the manner of making an oyle of the flowers which he saith is very effectuall to ease the pains of the Goute, and such like diseases, to be used outwardly, which is thus: Having filled a glasse with the flowers, and being well stopped, set it for a moneths space in an Antshill, and after being dreigned clear, set it by to use.