True Pleasure of a Garden: The Garden of Euphues

We cannot call it romantic, for there are no hidden depths, there is no mystery, but it is like a garden out of a play nevertheless, or from a story-book of knights and ladies, the air in it is still, the perfumes hang in the air where they come and go `like the warbling of music', the antitheses are monotonously sweet, the light seldom changes. Bacon's ideal garden is the garden of a king, yet it has no regal qualities save extravagance; there is no provision for a resident court, no attempt to impress, nor air of an outdoor audience chamber. He frankly says that great princes sometimes add `statues and such things for state and magnificence, but nothing to the true pleasure of a garden'. What is this true pleasure of a garden which must be so different from the pleasures of Italy and France? It is, he says, the purest of human pleasures; `it is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man; without which, buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks'. There is no respect in which a king differs from a peasant in this matter save that he may feed his pleasure on a larger scale. If the gardens of Cicero and the Medici were for talking in, and the gardens of France to be seen in, and the gardens of seventeenth-century England for walking in, the garden of Bacon was far more like that of the younger Pliny, a place in which to refresh the private spirit. Bacon starts his description of the ideal garden with details of how he will seek to provide there ver perpetuum, eternal spring.