Simplicissimus goes on:  ’During this song, methinks, it was as if nightingale, owl, and echo had combined in song, and if ever I had been able to hear the morning star, or to try to imitate the melody on my bagpipe, I should have slipt away out of the hut to join in the melody, so beautiful it seemed; but I was asleep.’

What was the general feeling for Nature in other countries during the latter half of the seventeenth century?  In Italy and Spain it had assumed a form partly bucolic and idyllic, partly theosophically mystical; Shakespeare’s plays had brought sympathy to maturity in England; the Netherlands had given birth to landscape painting, and France had the splendid poetic landscapes of Claude Lorraine.  But the idealism thus reached soon degenerated into mannerism and artificiality, the hatching of empty effect.

The aberrations of taste which found expression in the periwig style of Louis XIV., and in the pigtails of the eighteenth century, affected the feeling for Nature too.  The histories of taste in general, and of feeling for Nature, have this in common, that their line of progress is not uniformly straightforward, but liable to zigzags.  This is best seen in reviewing the different civilized races together.  Moreover, new ideas, however forcible and original, even epoch-making, do not win acceptance at once, but rather trickle slowly through resisting layers; it is long before any new gain in culture becomes the common property of the educated, and hence opposite extremes are often found side by side—­taste for what is natural with taste for what is artificial.  Garden style is always a delicate test of feeling for Nature, shewing, as it does, whether we respect her ways or wish to impose our own.  The impulse towards the modern French gardening came from Italy.  Ancient and modern times both had to do with it.  At the Renaissance there was a return to Pliny’s style,[11] which the Cinque cento gardens copied.  In this style laurel and box-hedges were clipt, and marble statues placed against them, ’to break the uniformity of the dark green with pleasant silhouettes.  One looks almost in vain for flowers and turf; even trees were exiled to a special wilderness at the edge of the garden; but the great ornament of the whole was never missing, the wide view over sunny plains and dome-capt towns, or over the distant shimmering sea, which had gladdened the eyes of Roman rulers in classic days.’[12]

The old French garden as Maitre Lenotre laid it out in Louis XIV.’s time at Versailles, St Germain, and St Cloud, was architectural in design, and directly connected, like Pliny’s, with various parts of the house, by open halls, pavilions, and colonnades.  Every part of it—­from neat turf parterres bordered by box in front of the terrace, designs worked out in flowers or coloured stones, and double rows of orange spaliers, to groups of statues and fountains—­belonged to one symmetrical plan, the focus of which was the