together, alike in the near neighbourhood of the house, and in its far prospect, so that the scene, as it meets the eye, whether at a distance or near, should present a picture of a simple whole, in which each item should take its part without disturbing the individual expression of the ground. To attain this result, it is essential that the ground immediately about the house should be devoted to symmetrical planning, and to distinctly ornamental treatment; and the symmetry should break away by easy stages from the dressed to the undressed parts, and so on to the open country, beginning with wilder effects upon the country-boundaries of the place and more careful and intricate effects as the house is approached.'

The foremost exponent of the free school advocates the bringing up of the lawn without break of any kind to the house itself, at least on one side, but this treatment would seem to be less artistic than that described by Mr. Sedding.

About five-and-twenty years ago, when English gardening was mostly represented by the inane futilities of the bedding' system, with its wearisome repetitions and garish colouring, Mr. William Robinson chose as his work in life to make better known the treasures that were lying neglected. It is mainly owing to his unremitting labours that a clear knowledge of the world of hardy-plant beauty is now placed within easy reach of all who care to acquire it, and that the bedding' mania is virtually dead. Now, by easy reference to his practical books as an aid to personal industry, we may see how best to use and enjoy the thousands of beautiful plants that have been brought to us by the men who have given fortune, health, and often life, in perilous travel, that our gardens may be enriched and botanical knowledge extended. We cannot now, with all this treasure at our feet, neglect it and refuse it the gratefully appreciative use that it deserves. We cannot now go back a century or two and stop short at the art of the formal gardener any more than we can go back to the speech of our forefathers, beautiful though it was. There is change and growth in all wholesome Art, and gardening at its best is a fine art. For ever true is what Bacon says: 'Men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection.' To borrow illustrations from other arts, the champions of the formal garden would stop short at the music of Bach, which represented the widest scope and highest developement of the art in his day. But since then instruments have grown in kind and in compass, and the range of possibilities in orchestral combination has widely increased, so that the music of to-day is no longer the music

of Bach, nor restrained within the same limits. The pictorial art of Botticelli is everything that the architects claim for the formal garden; it is full of sweetness and beauty, full of limitations, frankly artificial, frankly artistic. But painting could not remain within the bounds that fenced. the art of Botticelli, and a century later we have the work of the great Venetians, and again, in rather less than another hundred years, that of Velasquez and Rembrandt. So near to nature does Velasquez come that Ruskin says of his portraiture,' He flings the man himself upon the canvas; and yet so strong within him is the true artistic conscience, the knowledge of right and wrong, the consummate taste that cannot overstep lawful bounds, that his portraits, though perhaps the most absolutely lifelike that have ever been painted, are full of the noble dignity that can only be achieved within the unconscious restraints of the great 'style.'

In one of the collects of the English Prayer Book occurs the magnificent phrase, 'whose service is perfect freedom; a precious axiom in all religion, morality, and fine art— perfect freedom within certain bounds, liberty but not license. So, claiming for gardening that it shall be ranked among the fine arts, its resources and its wide field must be free for the uses of the garden artist.

We have now the means of learning not only how to treat the home garden, but how to carry the planting of flowers into further spaces of field and woodland by the naturalisation of rightly chosen and rightly placed exotic plants. The daffodils of the Alps and the Pyrenees easily make themselves at home in our meadows and copses, and many a beautiful plant from North America and Northern Asia, and the forest and mountain regions of Europe, is not difficult to establish in suitable places. But wild gardening is by no means easy-indeed, it is a kind of pitfall in the path of the impulsive and unwary, for there are more ways of getting into trouble in this than in any other kind of ornamental cultivation.

Even in ordinary gardening there is almost too much. to choose from. One of the modern French artists has described painting as l'art des sacrifices.' The best free gardening is also an art demanding constant restraint and constant sacrifice, as well as the knowledge and keen discrimination that can choose, out of the now boundless wealth of form and colour, what will serve best to make the intended garden-picture. It is not so easy to go wrong in the formal

ment.

garden, because of its limitations, but even here the parterre may be filled with a vulgar and painful glare of clashing crudities such as were frequent in the worst days of bedding.' Still the scope for the masterly use of colour is greater in the free garden, and the opportunities are endless both for sober ranges of quiet harmonies and for rich pictures of culminating gorgeousness. Surely it is well that gardens should show as many beautiful kinds of treatment as possible; not that any one garden should try for all, but at least for some one or two pictures of lovely form or colour or delightful arrangeAfter all, what is a garden for? It is for delight,' for sweet solace,' for the purest of all human pleasures; 'the greatest refreshment of the spirits of men;' it is to promote jucunditie of minde;' it is to call home over'wearied spirits.' So say the old writers, and we cannot amend their words, which will stand as long as there are gardens on earth and people to love them. And though the successful practice of gardening needs study and labour as well as good will, every step in the path is full of interest, and the garden yields a hundredfold reward of enjoyment for the loving labour bestowed on it.

6

Twenty-five years ago a book was written by a dying man, Dr. Forbes Watson. He wished that the last work of his waning life should be to put on record the pure delight he had received from the beauty of flowers. Whether it was the influence of this short and touching book that led others who loved their gardens to wish to spread a knowledge of the good things waiting for those who would have them, or whether the desire to write in praise of gardens was the natural result of the better knowledge of their delights that was already rapidly growing, it is hard to say, but within a year or two appeared Mr. Bright's A Year in a Lancashire 'Garden,' a book that made many people understand what good things were ready for those who would take the trouble. to find them. His record of a year's experience, of the failures and successes of a simple English garden, of its soon forgotten mishaps and its many glad surprises, must have been of great encouragement to those who in gardening were in the groping stage, showing them, as it cannot fail to do, how much of beauty and delight there was to lay hold of. Again, a few years later came' Days and Hours in a Garden' from the pen of E. V. B.,' the work of a woman of the sensitive artist-temperament; the expression of her thankfulness for the comfort, the sweet solace,' the 'refreshment ' of spirit,' derived from her beautiful old garden in intervals

of rest during months of anxious attendance in a sick

room.

In 1891 was published John Sedding's Garden Craft.'* His professional training as architect led him to favour the formal style, but it is strangely interesting to see throughout the book how the saintly simplicity of his character and the poetry of his nature made him forget his professional bonds and do justice to the best methods of the free garden, and do we not hear of him in his country home, in brief periods. of rest, finding the same sweet solace' in his homely garden of familiar flowers? He did not live to see his book published; he was struck down in the very field of his work, and his coffin was carried to his last resting-place covered by the children's pall, whose ornament of daisies and suchlike simple blossoms he had lately designed, and that had just been worked by the wife who could not survive him and who followed him to the grave a week later.

The poets, in unbroken line, have sung of garden-delights. Does not Chaucer say:

'The savour of the roses swote

Me smote right to the herte rote?'

and who does not enjoy the books of our latest gardenerpoet, Alfred Austin, whose musical prose, interwoven with a thread of delicate and kindly humour, sets forth his keen delight in the beauty of garden and grove and orchard?

* See Edinburgh Review for July 1892, vol. clxxvi. p. 174.

ART. VIII.-1. Annales de l'Assemblée Nationale. Paris : 1871-1875.

2. L'Année Politique. Par ANDRÉ DANIEL. Paris: 18741895.

3. Annuaire Statistique de la France. Quinzième volume. 1892, 1893, 1894. Paris 1894.

CONTEMPORARY history is always difficult to write, and in

France peculiarly so, owing to the feeling which the historian cannot help experiencing when commencing his first page that before reaching his last chapter he may have to record the fall of the régime he has taken in hand. Hence it is that even when a form of government has disappeared it is necessary to let a whole generation elapse before attempting to make history of it, in order to see if the rise and fall of its successor can throw any light on the causes of its want of stability. Thus the monarchy of July only found an historian when the youngest of its makers had passed away, and M. Thureau Dangin published the first of his volumes which have given him a seat in the Académie Française thirty-six years after the Orleans dynasty was driven from the throne. The Second Empire did not encourage contemporary history, but though nearly a generation has passed since it disappeared it is only within the last year or two that any serious attempt has been made to chronicle in historical spirit the reign of Louis Napoleon. It may be therefore taken as certain that, whether the Third Republic sees the dawn of a new century or not, the twentieth will be out of its teens before the history can be written of the régime which has administered France since the battle of Sedan. Meanwhile, without having recourse to files of journals, to annuals, and to memoirs few of which have literary merit, it is extremely difficult for the ordinary reader who takes an interest in contemporary history to be conversant with the events which, since the Franco-German war, have taken place among the great nation which came second best out of that struggle. It has seemed to us, therefore, that, as a quarter of a century has just elapsed since peaceful government was restored to France, it is a convenient moment to take a retrospective survey of the internal history of our neighbours. In doing so we shall avoid all party bias or preference, and we shall not attempt to evolve any theory from the events to be set forth in order, nor to base upon them any prophecy for the future.