“the crisped brooks,
    Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold
    With mazy error under pendent shades,
    Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
    Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art
    In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon
    Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain.”

Going far behind all conventionalities, he credited to Paradise—­the ideal of man’s happiest estate—­variety, irregularity, profusion, luxuriance; and to the fallen estate, precision, formality, and an inexorable Art, which, in place of concealing, glorified itself.  In the next century, when Milton comes to be illustrated by Addison and the rest, we shall find gardens of a different style from those of Waller and of Hampton Court.

And now from some look-out point near to the close of the seventeenth century, when John Evelyn, in his age, is repairing the damages that Peter the Great has wrought in his pretty Deptford home, let us take a bird’s-eye glance at rural England.

It is raining; and the clumsy Bedford coach, drawn by stout Flemish mares,—­for thorough-breds are as yet unknown,—­is covered with a sail-cloth to keep the wet away from the six “insides.”  The grass, wherever the land is stocked with grass, is as velvety as now.  The wheat in the near county of Herts is fair, and will turn twenty bushels to the acre; here and there an enterprising landholder has a small field of dibbled grain, which will yield a third more.  John Worlidge’s drill is not in request, and is only talked of by a few wiseacres who prophesy its ultimate adoption.  The fat bullocks of Bedford will not dress more than seven hundred a head; and the cows, if killed, would not overrun five hundred weight.  There are occasional fields of sainfoin and of turnips; but these latter are small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet practised.  From time to time appears a patch of barren moorland, which has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving.  Wide reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by ghost-like companies of cranes.

The gardens attached to noble houses, under the care of some pupil of Wise, or of Parkinson, have their espaliers,—­their plums, their pears,[5] and their grapes.  These last are rare, however, (Parkinson says sour, too,) and bear a great price in the London market.  One or two horticulturists of extraordinary enterprise have built greenhouses, warmed, Evelyn says, “in a most ingenious way, by passing a brick flue underneath the beds.”