Here universal Pan,
    Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,
    Leads on the eternal Spring.

It is said that the gardens at Nuneham were laid out by Mason, the poet.

[032] Mrs. Stowe visited the Jardin Mabille in the Champs Elysees, a sort of French Vauxhall, where small jets of gas were so arranged as to imitate “flowers of the softest tints and the most perfect shape.”

[033] Napoleon, it is said, once conceived the plan of roofing with glass the gardens of the Tuileries, so that they might be used as a winter promenade.

[034] Addison in the 477th number of the Spectator in alluding to Kensington Gardens, observes; “I think there are as many kinds of gardening as poetry; our makers of parterres and flower gardens are epigrammatists and sonnetteers in the art; contrivers of bowers and grottos, treillages and cascades, are romance writers.  Wise and London are our heroic poets; and if I may single out any passage of their works to commend I shall take notice of that part in the upper garden at Kensington, which was at first nothing but a gravel pit.  It must have been a fine genius for gardening that could have thought of forming such an unsightly hollow unto so beautiful an area and to have hit the eye with so uncommon and agreeable a scene as that which it is now wrought into.”

[035] Lord Bathurst, says London, informed Daines Barrington, that he (Lord Bathurst) was the first who deviated from the straight line in sheets of water by following the lines in a valley in widening a brook at Ryskins, near Colnbrook; and Lord Strafford, thinking that it was done from poverty or economy asked him to own fairly how little more it would have cost him to have made it straight.  In these days no possessor of a park or garden has the water on his grounds either straight or square if he can make it resemble the Thames as described by Wordsworth: 

    The river wanders at its own sweet will.

Horace Walpole in his lively and pleasant little work on Modern Gardening almost anticipates this thought.  In commending Kent’s style of landscape-gardening he observes:  “The gentle stream was taught to serpentize at its pleasure."

[036] This Palm-house, “the glory of the gardens,” occupies an area of 362 ft. in length; the centre is an hundred ft. in width and 66 ft. in height.

It must charm a Native of the East on a visit to our country, to behold such carefully cultured specimens, in a great glass-case in England, of the trees called by Linnaeus “the Princes of the vegetable kingdom,” and which grow so wildly and in such abundance in every corner of Hindustan.  In this conservatory also are the banana and plantain.  The people of England are in these days acquainted, by touch and sight, with almost all the trees that grow in the several quarters of the world.  Our artists can now take sketches of foreign plants without crossing the seas.  An allusion to the Palm tree recals some criticisms on Shakespeare’s botanical knowledge.