“It is not surprizing that garden-houses as they were called; should have formerly abounded in Holborn, in Bunhill Row, and other (at that time) suburban places.  We notice the fact, in order to observe how fond the poets were of occupying houses of this description.  Milton seems to have made a point of having one.  The only London residence of Chapman which is known, was in Old Street Road; doubtless at that time a rural suburb.  Beaumont and Fletcher’s house, on the Surrey side of the Thames, (for they lived as well as wrote together,) most probably had a garden; and Dryden’s house in Gerard Street looked into the garden of the mansion built by the Earls of Leicester.  A tree, or even a flower, put in a window in the streets of a great city, (and the London citizens, to their credit, are fond of flowers,) affects the eye something in the same way as the hand-organs, which bring unexpected music to the ear.  They refresh the common-places of life, shed a harmony through the busy discord, and appeal to those first sources of emotion, which are associated with the remembrance of all that is young and innocent.”

Milton must have been a passionate lover of flowers and flower-gardens or he could never have exhibited the exquisite taste and genial feeling which characterize all the floral allusions and descriptions with which so much of his poetry is embellished.  He lived for some time in a house in Westminster over-looking the Park.  The same house was tenanted by Jeremy Bentham for forty years.  It would be difficult to meet with any two individuals of more opposite temperaments than the author of Paradise Lost and the Utilitarian Philosopher.  There is or was a stone in the wall at the end of the garden inscribed TO THE PRINCE OF POETS.  Two beautiful cotton trees overarched the inscription, “and to show” says Hazlitt, (who subsequently lived in the same house himself,) “how little the refinements of taste or fancy entered Bentham’s system, he proposed at one time to cut down these beautiful trees, to convert the garden, where he had breathed an air of truth and heaven for near half a century, into a paltry Chreistomathic School, and to make Milton’s house (the cradle of Paradise Lost) a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster to pass backwards and forwards to it with their cloven hoofs!”

No poet, ancient or modern, has described a garden on a large scale in so noble a style as Milton.  He has anticipated the finest conceptions of the latest landscape-gardeners, and infinitely surpassed all the accounts we have met with of the gardens of the olden time before us.  His Paradise is a

    Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned
    Or of revived Adonis or renowned
    Alcinous, host of old Laertes’ son
    Or that, not mystic, where the sapient King
    Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse[010]

The description is too long to quote entire, but I must make room for a delightful extract.  Familiar as it must be to all lovers of poetry, who will object to read it again and again?  Genuine poetry is like a masterpiece of the painter’s art:—­we can gaze with admiration for the hundredth time on a noble picture.  The mind and the eye are never satiated with the truly beautiful.  “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”