If the fathers of the monastic orders had their tastes in scenery and situation, their degenerate posterity at Oxford and Cambridge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took great pleasure in gardens. Paradise and Christ Church Walks, Merton and Magdalene Gardens, St John's Grove, New College and Wadham Gardens, Trinity Mount—beguiled the solitude of Earle, Addison, and Whitefield; while ‘Kinges colledge backesides,’ the Groves of Peterhouse, Queens', and Trinity Hall, the Wilderness of St John's, the Gardens of Christ's, Emmanuel and Sidney, as well as the walks of Trinity, offered their attractions to Barrow and Simeon. The avenue of the last-named royal foundation, with Coton Church in the distance, suggested to the sportive fancy of Porson a type of a clerical fellowship which he declined — ‘a long dreary walk with a church at the end of it.’ Many, perchance, would question the great critic's estimate both of the ‘Coton grind’ and of the Trinity-fellowship and country-Parsonage—

However, gardens are not only suited for academic discussion and meditation, recreation and pleasant converse; but as they were in the days of Evelyn and Sir T. Browne, they may be made studies in themselves.