A well-kept lawn is a peculiar feature of our domestic life. In no other country can a few yards of turf be kept green and soft so beautifully as in England, where the humid climate, equable summer and short winter, combine to produce constant verdure and steady increase of elasticity. To go no further from home than the Tuileries, how melancholy is it to see the gardeners there daily directing their hose over the sun-dried plots! What poor results follow, although il est défendu to tread them. Terraces and orange-groves, boulevards and lime alleys, are poor substitutes for the emerald freshness of our own dewy lawns.
What can surpass the peacefulness of the lawn surrounding a country-house, when you draw up the blinds early on the first morning after your arrival? From the proud parading of the chaffinches over it, to the distant clang of the gardener sharpening his scythe, all is home-like. It seems to span the whole of life in an instant. Memory flies back to the days when, as a child, you sported on such a lawn, and looks on to the time when, seated old and feeble by its edge, some one who may be slumbering all unconscious as yet in the neighbouring wing, shall catch your lightest fancies and forestall your every wish. And, last scene of all, the level turf before you is inseparably connected with final rest. The mind halts by the
Two graves, grass-green, beside a gray church-tower,
Wash’d with still rains, and daisy-blossomed.
None of the ancients seem to have appreciated the luxury of a lawn. Homer praises the fabulous gardens of Alcinous, but they were more what we should call orchards. The Grecian idea of a garden was a sacred grove planted with flowers to supply garlands for the deities, while the Romans thought less of lawns than of fountains and rows of stately trees shading terraced walks. It was only in the Elizabethan era with ourselves that grass began to be considered a component part of a garden. The tilt-yard passing insensibly into the bowling-green, as the days of chivalry died out, left us the lawn; the word as well as the thing being thus comparatively modern.
Even Milton knows “lawns or level downs” only as sheep commons:
Russet lawns and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray.
And Lord Bacon, when laying out his “prince-like” garden, out of thirty acres, assigns four to the “green in the entrance.”
There are several kinds of lawns, each of them suitable to the rank and appearance of the building to which they belong. There is the palatial lawn, edging such a place as Belvoir Castle for instance; very large and magnificent, and withal little used save by the peacocks. It is generally fringed with rows of vases, shut in by noble avenues of spreading sycamores, and dotted with cedars or mulberry-trees of unknown antiquity. Sunshine and brilliant flowers seem part of its very nature; the massive octagonal sun-dial in one corner, echoing its key-note in the motto running round it—“’Tis only sunny hours I note.” It seems a desecration to tread on its springy verdure, and you feel, if you were called upon to mow its dignified precincts, that you ought solemnly to enclose the first crop in an ivory box, as Nero did his beard on shaving for the first time.
France has a good type of this lawn at Versailles, and the aged carp in the pond there are adjuncts exactly suited to the locality. We pitched a few fragments of gravel at them once to quicken their lazy movements, and were immediately attacked by a sentinel with fixed bayonet, just as we should deserve were we barbarians enough to plant unholy feet on such a lawn as we have described, sacred to coronets and strawberry leaves, and summer dances of the haute noblesse.
Another kind of lawn is that surrounding some ivy-covered mansion (once perchance a religious house), shaded by lofty elms, and falling gently to a sluggish river. If the former is the type of magnificence, this signifies repose. You shall seldom see merry groups of children playing on it. No Edwin woos his Angelina by these time-honoured precincts. Quaint treasures of the topiarian art guard its ancestral sanctity. The turf is softer than a Turkey carpet, and (broadly contrasting with the palatial lawn) yields till the foot is ankle-deep in moss. A runlet, overgrown with hart’s-tongues and the feathery lady-fern, generally splashes into the boundary stream, and the chargers dear to the proprietor’s youth, “donati jam rude,” graze calmly on the further side. “The family are often away,” the custodian tells you, himself most likely a canny Scotchman, like Andrew Fairservice, who is passing a green old age round the lawn. The deep oriels opening on to it are closed, no wheel-marks line the gravel; a general air of melancholy pervades the place. The very birds do not care to sing there; the trout are too sullen to rise at the May-flies between the water-lilies. It will probably soon be sold by the young squire, for no modern bride could endure such a dismal domain. Still it is a fine lawn in its way, and one not unseldom seen in retired corners of Old England.
Again, there is the college lawn, edged maybe by patriarchal horse-chestnuts, the pride of a University, as at St. John’s, Oxford. Read “The Princess” if you would realise its learned delights, roses and conic sections, nightingales and the Ethics, its very gravel walks reminding you of Differential Calculus. Defend us from the villa lawn, which is best described by the word “trim!” Its half-grown shrubs, and painfully new seats flanked by the staring red bricks and stone facings of Belle Vue or Prospect Place, may be seen on all sides as the railway dashes through the suburbs of London or any large town. What sense of home associations do the people possess who live in such places? They naturally skirt the railroad, for that is best suited to their constant bustle. Could you read “the Tempest” or “the Faëry Queene” in that pretentious bow-window? “Bradshaw” and the “Times” are the literature for it. As for lying on that sickly lawn, full of knobs, like a couch inno-