THE description given in the fifth scene of the gardens belonging to the villa, may appear but little in accordance with the habits and tastes of antiquity, and many may be inclined to imagine that some garden in the old French mode of the seventeenth or eighteenth century had served as a model. But the old proverb, that there is nothing new under the sun, holds good in this case. Gardens laid out in this style, in which vegetation was forced into stiff geometrical figures, and the knife and shears of the gardener annihilated every vestige of nature's free dominion, were in fashion at Rome, and not reserved for the invention of a later age. Indeed the ancients were more deserving of excuse for such absurdities, for the means afforded by nature in those days were but small in comparison with the abundant resources of our time. Foreign countries had not as yet unfolded their rich treasures of luxuriant and splendid vegetation, nor their thousand shrubs and flowers; and restricted to a barren flora, but little improved by culture, the Romans sought to create, by artificial means, a striking contrast to the free forms of Nature, and their trees and shrubs, such as the laurel, the cypress, the taxus, the buxus, the myrtle, and the rosemary, being in some measure naturally stiff in form, were quite adapted for their purposes.