Charles was an appreciative lover of poetry, too, as well as of Nature.  I wonder if it ever happened to him, in his prison-hours at Carisbrooke, to come upon Milton’s “L’Allegro,” (first printed in the very year of the Battle of Naseby,) and to read,—­

        “In thy right hand lead with thee
    The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty;
    And if I give thee honor due,
    Mirth, admit me of thy crew
    To live with her, and live with thee,
    In unreproved pleasures free;
    To hear the lark begin his flight,
    And, singing, startle the dull night,
    From his watch-tower in the skies,
    Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
    Then to come, in spite of sorrow,
    And at my window bid good-morrow,
    Through the sweetbrier, or the vine,
    Or the twisted eglantine.”

How it must have smitten the King’s heart to remember that the tender poet, whose rhythm none could appreciate better than he, was also the sturdy Puritan pamphleteer whose blows had thwacked so terribly upon the last props that held up his tottering throne!

Cromwell, as we have seen, gave Master Hartlib a pension; but whether on the score of his theological tracts, or his design for an agricultural college, would be hard to say.  I suspect that the hop was the Protector’s favorite among flowering plants, and that his admiration of trees was measured by their capacity for timber.  Yet that rare masculine energy, which he and his men carried with them in their tread all over England, was a very wakeful stimulus to productive agriculture.

Charles II. loved tulips, and befriended Evelyn.  In his long residence at Paris he had grown into a great fondness for the French gardens.  He afterward sent for Le Notre—­who had laid out Versailles at an expense of twenty millions of dollars—­to superintend the planting of Greenwich and St. James.  Fortunately, no strict imitation of Versailles was entered upon.  The splendors of Chatsworth Garden grew in this time out of the exaggerated taste, and must have delighted the French heart of Charles.  Other artists have had the handling of this great domain since the days of Le Notre.  A crazy wilderness of rock-work, amid which the artificial waters commit freak upon freak, has been strewed athwart the lawn; a stately conservatory has risen, under which the Duke may drive, if he choose, in coach and four, amid palm-trees, and the monster-vegetation of the Eastern archipelago; the little glass temple is in the gardens, under which the Victoria lily was first coaxed into British bloom; a model village has sprung up at the Park gates, in which each cottage is a gem, and seems transplanted from the last book on rural ornamentation.  But the sight of the village oppresses one with a strange incongruity; the charm of realism is wanting; it needs a population out of one of Watteau’s pictures,—­clean and deft as the painted figures; flesh and blood are too gross, too prone to muddy shoes, and to—­sneeze.