Juvenal represents Lucan reposing in a garden.[370] Tasso pictures
Rinaldo sitting beneath the shade in a fragrant meadow: Virgil describes
Anchises seated beneath sweet-scented bay-trees; and Eneas, as
reclining, remote from all society, in a deep and winding valley.[371]
Gassendi, who ingrafted the doctrine of Galileo on the theory of
Epicurus, took not greater pleasure in feasting his youthful imagination
by gazing on the moon, than Cyrus, in the cultivation of flowers.--“I
have measured, dug, and planted the large garden, which I have at the
gate of Babylon,” said that prince; “and never, when my health permit,
do I dine until I have laboured two hours in my garden: if there is
nothing to be done, I labour in my orchard.” Cyrus is also said to have
planted all the Lesser Asia. Ahasuerus was accustomed to quit the charms
of the banquet to indulge the luxury of his bower:[372] and the
conqueror of Mithridates enjoyed the society of his friends, and the
wine of Falernium, in the splendid gardens, which were an honour to his
name. Dion gave a pleasure-garden to Speucippus as a mark of peculiar
regard.[373] Linnæus studied in a bower: Buffon in his summer-house; and
when Demetrius Poliorcetes took the island of Rhodes, he found
Protogenes at his palette, painting in his arbour. Petrarch was never
happier than when indulging the innocent pleasures of his garden.--“I
have made myself two,” says he, in one of his epistles; “I do not
imagine they are to be equalled in all the world: I should feel myself
inclined to be angry with fortune, if there were any so beautiful out of
Italy.”
Many of the wisest and the best of men have signalized their love of
gardens and shrubberies, by causing themselves to be buried in them; a
custom once in frequent practice among the ancient Jews.[374] Plato was
buried in the groves of Academus; and sir William Temple, though he
expected to be interred in Westminster abbey, gave orders for his heart
to be enclosed in a silver casket, and placed under a sun-dial, in that
part of his garden immediately opposite the window of his library, from
which he was accustomed to contemplate the beauties and wonders of the
creation, in the society of a beloved sister.[375]
[370] The epithet he applies to _hortis_ is sufficiently curious. The
scholiast cites Pliny, 1. xxxvi. c. 1. 2. The style of the Roman
gardens in Trajan’s time is expressively marked:
Contentus fama jaceat Lucanus in hortis
_Marmoreis_.
JUV. Sat. vii. 1. 79.
It was very well said by one of the first women of the present age,
(Mrs. Grant,) that Darwin’s Botanic Garden is an Hesperian garden,
glittering all over; the fruit gold, the leaves silver, and the stems
brass.
[371] Eneid, lib. vi. 1. 679. lib. viii. 609.
[372] Esther, vii. 7. Tissaphernes had a garden, much resembling an
English park, which he called _Alcibiades_.
[373] Plutarch in Vit. Dion.
[374] In the middle of the Campo Santo, which is the most ancient
burying-place at Pisa, is a garden formed of earth, brought from the
neighbourhood of Jerusalem.
[375] Philosophy of Nature.
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