Note 2 — PREFACE.

It has often struck me (perhaps erroneously), that the attachment which the great Sully evinced for gardens, even to the last period of his long-protracted life, (eighty-two), might in some degree have been cherished or increased from the writings of the great Lord Bacon. When this illustrious duke retired to his country seats, wounded to the heart by the baseness of those who had flattered him when Henry was alive, his noble and honest mind indulged in the embellishment of his gardens. I will very briefly quote what history relates:—"The life he led in his retreat at Villebon, was accompanied with grandeur and even majesty, such as might be expected from a character so grave and full of dignity as his. His table was served with taste and magnificence; he admitted to it none but the nobility in his neighbourhood, some of the principal gentlemen, and the ladies and maids of honour, who belonged to the duchess of Sully. He often went into his gardens, and passing through a little covered alley, which separated the flower from the kitchen garden, ascended by a stone staircase (which the present duke of Sully has caused to be destroyed), into a large walk of linden trees, upon a terrace on the other side of the garden. It was then the taste to have a great many narrow walks, very closely shaded with four or five rows of trees, or palisadoes. Here he used to sit upon a settee painted green, amused himself by beholding on the one side an agreeable landscape, and on the other a second alley on a terrace extremely beautiful, which surrounded a large piece of water, and terminated by a wood of lofty trees. There was scarce one of his estates, those especially which had castles on them, where he did not leave marks of his magnificence, to which he was chiefly incited by a principle of charity, and regard to the public good. At Rosny, he raised that fine terrace, which runs along the Seine, to a prodigious extent, and those great gardens, filled with groves, arbours, and grottos, with water-works. He embellished Sully with gardens, of which the plants were the finest in the world, and with a canal, supplied with fresh water by the little river Sangle, which he turned that way, and which is afterwards lost in the Loire. He erected a machine to convey the water to all the basons and fountains, of which the gardens are full. He enlarged the castle of La Chapelle d'Angillon, and embellished it with gardens and terraces."

These gardens somewhat remind one of these lines, quoted by Barnaby Gooche:

Have fountaines sweet at hand, or mossie waters, Or pleasaunt brooke, that passing through the meads, is sweetly seene.

That fine gardens delighted Sully, is evident even from his own statement of his visit to the Duke d'Aumale's, at Anet, near Ivry, (where Henry and Sully fought in that famous battle), for he says,—"Joy animated the countenance of Madame d'Aumale the moment she perceived me. She gave me a most kind and friendly reception, took me by the hand, and led me through those fine galleries and beautiful gardens, which make Anet a most enchanting place." One may justly apply to Sully, what he himself applies to the Bishop of Evreaux: "A man for whom eloquence and great sentiments had powerful charms."

I had designed some few years ago, to have published a Review of some of the superb Gardens in France, during the reign of Henry IV. and during the succeeding reigns, till the demise of Louis XV., embellished with plates of some of the costly and magnificent decorations of those times; with extracts from such of their eminent writers whose letters or works may have occasionally dwelt on gardens.—My motto, for want of a better, might have been these two lines from Rapin,

——France, in all her rural pomp appears With numerous gardens stored.

Perhaps I might have been so greedy and insolent, as to have presumed to have monopolized our Shakspeare's line,—"I love France so well, that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine."

Isaac Walton gives the following lines from a translation of a German poet, which makes one equally fond of England:

We saw so many woods, and princely bowers, Sweet fields, brave palaces, and stately towers, So many gardens dress'd with curious care, That Thames with royal Tiber may compare.