The rock-work, also, is incongruous; it belongs on no such wavy roll of park-land; you see it a thousand times grander, a half-hour’s drive away, toward Matlock.  And the stiff parterres, terraces, and alleys of Le Notre are equally out of place in such a scene.  If, indeed, as at Versailles, they bounded and engrossed the view, so that natural surfaces should have no claim upon your eye,—­if they were the mere setting to a monster palace, whose colonnades and balusters of marble edged away into colonnades and balusters of box-wood, and these into a limitless extent of long green lines, which are only lost to the eye where a distant fountain dashes its spray of golden dust into the air,—­as at Versailles,—­there would be keeping.  But the Devonshire palace has quite other setting.  Blue Derbyshire hills are behind it; a grand, billowy slope of the comeliest park-land in England rolls down from its terrace-foot to where the Derwent, under hoary oaks, washes its thousand acres of meadow-vale, with a flow as charming and limpid as one of Virgil’s eclogues.  It is such a setting that carries the great quadrangle of Chatsworth Palace and its flanking artificialities of rock and garden, like a black patch upon the face of a fine woman of Charles’s court.

This brings us upon our line of march again.  Charles II. loved stiff gardens; James II. loved stiff gardens; and William, with his Low-Country tastes, out-stiffened both, with his

    “topiary box a-row.”

Lord Bacon has commended the formal style to public admiration by his advocacy and example.  The lesson was repeated at Cashiobury by the most noble the Earl of Essex (of whom Evelyn writes,—­“My Lord is not illiterate beyond the rate of most noblemen of his age").  So also that famous garden of Moor-Park in Hertfordshire, laid out by the witty Duchess of Bedford, to whom Dr. Donne addresses some of his piquant letters, was a model of old-fashioned and stately graces.  Sir William Temple praises it beyond reason in his “Garden of Epicurus,” and cautions readers against undertaking any of those irregularities of garden-figures which the Chinese so much affect.  He admires only stateliness and primness.  “Among us,” he says, “the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly in some certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformities; our Walks and our Trees ranged so as to answer one another, and at exact Distances.”

From all these it is clear what was the garden-drift of the century.  Even Waller, the poet,—­whose moneys, if he were like most poets, could not be thrown away idly,—­spent a large sum in levelling the hills about his rural home at Beaconsfields. (We shall find a different poet and treatment by-and-by in Shenstone.)

Only Milton, speaking from the very arcana of the Puritan rigidities, breaks in upon these geometric formalities with the rounded graces of the garden which he planted in Eden.  There