Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/207

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UNDER GEORGE I
133

Privy Garden. Under Queen Anne the "great Diana fountain," which had stood there, was moved to Bushey Park, and the fine Lion gates were set up at the end of the Wilderness. With this, and her crusade against Dutch box, Queen Anne seems to have been satisfied.

V

The gardens as Queen Anne left them, and as they were when the fat lady ("mere cataract of animal oils," Carlyle calls her) and the lean lady of George I. walked up and down what is now called Frog Walk (some say it was Frow Walk), must have been, Ithink, much like those which Thomson describes in "Spring," published in 1726. Every one is supposed to have read "The Seasons," but I doubt if the quotation is familiar. It certainly expresses the feeling of the period when formality was beginning to yield to a somewhat artificial Nature-worship.

"At length the finished garden to the view
Its vistas open and its alleys green.
Snatched through the verdant maze, the hurried eye
Distracted wanders; now the bowery walk
Of covert close, where scarce a speck of day
Falls on the lengthened gloom,protracted sweeps;
Now meets the bending sky: the river now,
Dimpling along, the breezy-ruffled lake,
The forest darkening round, the glittering spire,

The ethereal mountain, and the distant main.