But whatever it is, it must not be formal. It is true that in Shakespeare's day all gardens, that behaved themselves as such,' were formal. The paths were straight, the beds or knots in stiff, geometric figures, the shrubs all clipped into fantastic shapes, the trees pollarded or tortured into making covered ways, with statuary or vases at exactly equal distances. The gardens at Versailles used to be noble examples of this style, and though inexorably precise, were undeniably beautiful and stately, reflecting, and corresponding perfectly with, the formal, courtly ways of the times. Nor is it difficult to understand Queen Elizabeth considering them so admirable, for their very essence was Elizabethan. Everything in the garden stood as it were on ceremony. The plants all had a code of 'correct behaviour.' They never trespassed against etiquette.

Nowadays, of course, the craze is to break lines and abolish angles, and often, where space is limited, with very ridiculous results. This is called 'natural' gardening.

But we have no idea what Shakespeare admired in a garden. He never tells us.

Nowhere in his works do we meet with any descriptive epithets for a garden, except when Perdita apologises, as it were, for her 'rustic' garden, and again where the fantastical Armado writes, in a ludicrous letter, of the King's 'curiousknotted' garden. In twelve of his plays, gardens are mentioned, not in metaphors or similes, but as real places wherein the characters could actually walk. But not one of them is described. Orchards, in Shakespeare, take much the same place as gardens, for his scenes are sometimes placed in them, as if they were favourite strolling-grounds, which, as a matter of fact, they were, being really as much flower-garden as fruit orchard, and as much pleasure-ground as either. 'Meet me in the orchard,' come and walk in the orchard,' seems to have been as natural as meet me, or walk, in the garden. But we get after all only the faintest clue as to the garden idea of Shakespeare.

There was a garden-house, a pleached alley, a woodbine bower, and a box arbour, but these might have been in either an elaborate, 'curious-knotted,' or in a 'rustic' garden, and both are compatible with an orchard. In Anne Hathaway's, for instance, which was a mixture of garden and orchard, there was within this century a pleached alley and an arbour. The garden-house was a matter of more state, but then Angelo's gärden had a 'vineyard' attached to it, and was exceptional,

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being taken by the poet from the story on which the play was founded. Not that vineyards, however, were by any means extinct in England in Shakespeare's time: good wine, we are assured, was made, and in quantity, from English grapes, in the eighteenth century; and in the 'Pomarium Brittannicum' occurs the statement that there were, in the present nineteenth century, 'several flourishing vineyards in Somersetshire,' of which the wine was 'palatable and well-bodied.'

But except in Cymbeline and Antony and Cleopatra, where individuals are spoken of as being 'in the garden,' every reference in Shakespeare to a garden is accompanied by allusions to the fruit growing in it. In Winter's Tale is the only exception; but this 'rustic' garden, if it had not fruit, had no flowers either, only herbs. At any rate, all that Perdita had to give away to her visitors, were marigolds, mint, lavender, rosemary, marjoram, savory, and rue, which to modern ideas belong rather to the herb than to the flower garden. The scene, of course, is laid at 'a shepherd's cottage,' and these sweet-herbs still hold their place in the humble gardens of cottages.

Moreover, Shakespeare in this scene is as careless as needs be. Sheep-shearing, for instance, is going on in late autumn, 'the year growing ancient, not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth of trembling winter' (which, if it means any particular time of the year, means autumn). 'Carnations and streaked gilliflowers' were, Perdita says, at their best, but if so, it was a very 'rustic' sort of garden indeed that could produce only marigolds for nosegays in, what she calls, 'middle summer.' Rustic gardens, as a rule, are very gay in autumn.

As it happens, Ben Jonson has a masque of 'Pan's Anniversary' for which no time of the year can be fixed, but the nights are 'bright,' and they dance on 'the green swarth.' A shepherd superintends the floral decorations, and his requirements cover arbitrarily flowers of all seasons, but as the scene is laid in 'Arcadia,' and 'nymphs' performed in it, the old rustic's demands need not be too pedantically criticised. But in the long list of flowers, for which he calls, are many cottagers' favourites that might have been at Perdita's disposal in 'middle summer,' or in the autumn.

And nothing could be quoted more happily illustrating the different methods of these two great men. Shakespeare, immeasurably the greater of the two, carelessly took what came to hand, and the less the better; but his meagre posies live for

ever by the magic of the beauty of his language. Who, once reading, ever forgets Perdita's daffodils, that 'take the winds of March with beauty,' or the 'violets dim, but sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, or Cytherea's breath.' Those she had not got. Or 'the marigold that goes to bed wi' the sun, and with him rises weeping.' That she had. How beautiful the poetry is, though the flowers in hand be so curiously few! Ben Jonson, on the other hand, labouring to enrich his lines, overloads them with a burden of sweet flowers' names, not one of which, though the lines may be learned by heart, ever recurs again to memory.

'2nd Nymph. Strew, strew the glad and smiling ground

With every flower, yet not confound

The primrose drop, the spring's own spouse,
Bright day's eyes, and the lips of cows,
The garden-star, the queen of May,
The rose to crown the holyday.

'3rd Nymph. Drop, drop your violets, change your hues,
Now red, now pale, as lovers' use,

And in your death go out as well,
As when you lived, unto the smell;
That from your odour all may say,
This is the shepherd's holyday.

'Shepherd. Well done, my pretty ones, rain roses still
Until the last be dropt, then hence, and fill
Your fragrant prickles for a second shower;
Bring corn-flag, tulips, and Adonis' flower,
Fair ox-eye, goldy-locks, and columbine,
Pinks, goulands, king-cups, and sweet sops-in-wine,
Blue harebells, paigles, pansies, calaminth,
Flower-gentle, and the fair-haired hyacinth.
Bring rich carnations, flower-de-luces, lilies,
The checquered, and purple-ringed daffodillies,
Bright crown imperial, kingspear, holyhocks,
Sweet Venus-navel and soft lady-smocks;
Bring too some branches forth of Daphne's hair,
And gladdest myrtle for these posts to wear,
With spikenard weaved, and marjoram between,
And starred with yellow-golds and meadow's queen,
That when the altar, as it ought, is drest,

More odour come not from the phoenix' nest.'

These are all the flowers of a 'rustic garden;' but Perdita does not claim them for her nosegays. Here, take your flowers,' she says briefly, but what they were, we shall, alas

never know. Yet Shakespeare never came nearer to describing a flower garden than then.

In Richard II. there is a garden, but it has fruit-trees in it; that in Richard III., in Holborn, is mentioned for its strawberries. In Henry VI., Cade climbs into a garden in order to find something to eat there. In Twelfth Night, there are scenes 'in Olivia's garden,' and though a 'garden gate' is mentioned and a box-tree arbour, all the talk is of 'the orchard.' So in Much Ado, the scenes are laid in Leonato's garden, but no one uses the word 'garden.' It is always 'the orchard.' In Richard II., the gardener, moralizing, talks of his fruit-trees, vegetables, and herbs, and Iago, on the same theme, does the same. From all of which it is obvious that whenever Shakespeare thought of a garden, he thought of a mixed one, such a garden as any country house might have, and not of any particular pleasure-ground of the statelier Elizabethan kind, such as attracted Spenser and Ben Jonson. His only accessories are of a very ordinary kind—a summer-house, an arbour, a covered way. The only time that Marlowe speaks of an individual garden, it is of a flower-garden and orchard combined, with beehives, a fish-pond, and aviary. In all Shakespeare's gardens we get no suggestion of anything except shady fruit-trees and creeper-covered summer-houses.

In the sketch I have given for a Shakespeare garden, I have made a general conscription of his vegetables, from forest trees to weeds, and the sum total furnishes forth my enclosure bravely. But if we dismissed from the grounds everything that was not 'a garden flower,' even in his own day, let us see what would remain.

There would be roses, lilies, violets, carnations and gilliflowers, columbine, fleur-de-luce, crown-imperial, marigolds, pansies, daffodils, rosemary, and lavender. In the shrubbery would be laurel, bay, box, cypress, yew, and myrtle.

Of these the fleur-de-luce, crown-imperial, pansies, box, and lavender are each of them only once mentioned by name only. Columbines are among the flowers given with supposed significance, by Ophelia to her brother, but in conjunction with fennel is difficult to translate, as columbine means 'folly,' and fennel 'strength.'

It is interesting to note that in Shakespeare's day vervain was also called 'columbine,' while our present flower of the name was also known as 'culverkeys' and 'lion's-herb.' Nor

was the latter altogether of good repute. Its meaning, in flower language, hints at this, and Chapman has the lines

'What, that—a columbine ?

No, that thankless flower grows not in my garden.'

Now, vervain was a herb of very great 'virtue and grace,' and one of its significances was ' undying affection,' and Shakespeare is perhaps the only poet of his day who does not refer by name to 'the vervain blue.' The flower columbine was a favourite one in Elizabethan times and grown of several colours, and there was an adjective' colombyne,' which Chaucer, for instance, uses the 'columbine eyes,' where the double meaning of blue and 'dove-eyed' (a phrase Shakespeare uses) is charmingly conveyed.

The carnations of Perdita are the same that we now know by the name, which is a curious one, for Ben Jonson speaks of carnations as 'coronations' and of Coronation Day as 'carnation-day.' The name of the flower is, in fact, a corruption of coronation, as the intermediate form of 'coronation' sufficiently proves and Jonson's interchange of the two words further establishes. They were cultivated in great variety in Shakespeare's time, those that were clove-scented, and therefore used for flavouring 'cups,' being called 'sops-in-wine,' and the whole family known as 'gilliflowers,' 'July-flowers,' 'jelophers,' 'gillyvors,' 'gylofres,' or, in fact, by any variation of the old name for a clove.

The streaked gilliflowers of Winter's Tale are particularly interesting to the poet's students, from the exceptional length at which he stops to exchange opinions upon the hybridising of the carnation. Perdita says she has none of them in her garden, whereupon Polyexenes advises her to get some; but she refuses, saying that they are not pure-bred flowers, but 'bastards,' and she does not like them, being artificial and gaudy. Still pressed on the point, she becomes very positive, and declares she will not have any of them, and then the action of the Play, after this charming horticultural discussion, proceeds.

There is very little gardening, except of the most rudimentary kind, in Shakespeare, so that this passage is noteworthy, and there is something very pleasing in the fancy that the poet had perhaps that very day been in some garden and noticed a gardener grafting his carnations, to produce new varieties, and

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