Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ALBURY, SURREY " Now birds record new harmony; And trees do whistle melody! Now everything that Nature heeds Doth clad itself in pleasant weeds." Thomas Watson ALBURY, SURREY OF all the fascinating characters of the Restoration, none was more wholly delightful or exercised a wider influence over his contemporaries than John Evelyn. Living in the times of Charles I., Oliver Cromwell, Charles II., James II., and William III., though a pronounced Royalist, he was yet respected by Cromwell—no lover of the King's friends—and much sought after by both the learned and the rich for the charm of his conversation and the greatness of his abilities. Evelyn has left behind him two living evidences of his genius— his books and his Gardens. Of his many books the one best known to-day is his Diary—a veritable treasure-house of customs, habits, and fashions at one of the most interesting periods of history. And his Gardens have justly earned for him the title of the Greatest of England's Garden Philosophers. Infinite charm is to be found in the Gardens designed by Evelyn—a charm apparently lost in thesemodern days, and which no well-intentioned copy ever achieves. So subtle and delicate is it that it only lingers in the Gardens that he not merely designed but whose progress was his personal care. How strongly the spirit of the man (who, Horace Walpole says, " really was the neighbour of the Gospel, for there was no man that might not have been the better for him") dwells in his Gardens can best be realised by those who have paced the Terraces at Albury Park, belonging to the Duke of Northumberland, one of the many English Gardens which owes its chief beauties to Evelyn's genius. This Albury Park is often mentioned in the Diary ; the first allusion to it being in 1648, when Evelyn ...