So too, after quoting Temple's description of the garden at Moor Park with the master's little rhapsody--"the sweetest place I think that I have seen in my life, either before or since, at home or abroad"--Walpole has this icy sneer: "Any man might design and _build_ as sweet a garden who had been born in and never stirred out of Holborn. It was not peculiar in Sir William Temple to think in that manner."
It is not wise, however, to lay too much stress upon criticisms of this sort. After all, any phase of Art does but express the mind of its day, and it cannot do duty for the mind of another time. "The old order changeth, yielding place to new," and to take a critical attitude towards the forms of an older day is almost a necessity of the case; they soon become curiosities. Yet we may fairly regret the want of tenderness in dealing with these gardens of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, for, by all the laws of human expression, they should be masterpieces. The ground-chord of the garden-enterprise of those days was struck by Bacon, who rates buildings and palaces, be they never so princely, as "but gross handiworks" where no garden is: "Men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the Greater Perfection"--the truth of which saying is only too glaringly apparent in the relative conditions of the arts of architecture and of gardening in the present day!
By all the laws of human expression, I say, these old gardens should be masterpieces. The sixteenth century, which saw the English garden formulated, was a time for grand enterprises; indeed, to this period is ascribed the making of England. These gardens, then, are the handiwork of the makers of England, and should bear the marks of heroes. They are relics of the men and women who made our land both fine and famous in the days of the Tudors; they represent the mellow fruit of the leisure, the poetic reverie, the patient craft of men versed in great affairs--big men, who thought and did big things--men of splendid genius and stately notions--past-masters of the art of life who would drink life to the lees.
As gardeners, these old statesmen were no dabblers. They had the good fortune to live in a current of ideas of formal device that touched art at all points and was well calculated to assist the creative faculty in design of all kinds. They lived before the art of bad gardening had been invented; before pretty thoughts had palled the taste, before gardening had learnt routine; while Nature smiled a virgin smile and had a sense of unsolved mystery. More than this, garden-craft was then no mere craze or passing freak of fashion, but a serious item in the round of home-life; --gardening was a thing to be done as well as it could be done. Design was fresh and open to individual treatment--men needed an outlet for their love of, their elation at, the sight of beautiful things, and behind them lay the background of far-reaching traditions to encourage, inspire, protect experiment with the friendly shadow of authority.