TOOKE, Thomas, a political economist, was the son of the Rev. William Tooke, preacher at the English chapel in Cronstadt, and author of a History of Russia, a Life of Catherine II., and other works; and brother to William Tooke, the editor of Churchill, was born at St Petersburg in 1774. Having early embarked in business as a merchant engaged in the Russian trade, he became acquainted almost from his youth with those details of ordinary business which in his maturer years he was to grasp with so firm a hand, and strain out of them the profound economic secrets which were to guide future thinkers and legislators. He published in 1823 his Thoughts and Details on High and Low Prices, which was followed up by his great work, the History of Prices, in 6 vols., 1838–1857. In the last two volumes of this work, Tooke had the assistance of his friend and pupil Mr Newmarch. Tooke is known to have written in 1820 the famous Merchants' Petition, and to have brought it before the Legislature solely by his own exertions. In 1831 he founded the Political Economy Club, which is now vigorous and flourishing. He died on the borders of his eighty-fifth year, on the 26th of February 1858.
Tooke had an eminently solid head—patient, observant, and sagacious; and he worked his way with slow and sure steps to the generalisation of those economic laws, the details of which had always been common property, but the eye to see which had only been given to this patient inquirer.
TOPIARY WORK was the name formerly given to trees and shrubs which had been trained or cut so as to resemble some object of nature or art. The Romans applied the word topia to such figures, and the term topiarius to the artist. The origin of these words may perhaps be found in the Greek word ronia, a rope, for it was by means of ropes and strings that the branches were twisted and trained into the desired shape. It is said that one Matius, a friend of Augustus, was the person who brought into fashion the custom of clipping and trimming plants into imitations of other objects. However that may be, there are numerous passages in ancient authors which show how much attached the Romans became to this mode of ornamenting their gardens. Cicero, writing to his brother on the subject of a villa belonging to him, says, "I have praised your gardener, for he has clothed everything with ivy, both the base of the villa and the pillars of the walk, so that the statues themselves seem to be constructing topiary work, and to be
offering ivy for sale." From the minute account of Pliny's Tusculan villa given us by the owner, we learn that his lawn was decorated with numerous figures of animals cut in box, and was surrounded by a walk inclosed by evergreens shorn into a great variety of forms. Beyond this was a place for taking exercise, the middle ornamented with box-trees cropped into a great diversity of figures. The whole garden was fenced in by a wall covered with box rising in several stages to the top. In another part of the estate were many branching paths divided from each other by box-hedges cut into letters, some of which expressed the name of the owner, others that of the artificer. In another place he mentions that the cypress was trained into representations of various objects (N. H. l. 6, c. 33). Vitruvius (l. 7, c. 5) tells us of some work of this kind which represented images of the gods, the Trojan war, and the wanderings of Ulysses. This style of ornament was not, it seems, to the taste of Martial, who praised a Baian villa because it partook of a certain degree of wildness, and was destitute of "idle myrtle groves and cut box." The practice, however, descended to the Italians, and to this day many specimens of topiary art may be seen in the gardens of the Roman nobility. It was also adopted by the French and Dutch, and from them came into England, where many gardens were laid out in this style two hundred years ago. Travellers tell us that the Chinese delight in torturing shrubs into the forms of pagodas, junks, and animals; amongst which they speak of imitations of deer, the antlers and every part so neatly grown that they excited involuntary admiration.
The labour once bestowed upon designing and executing topiary works will hardly now be credited, nor can the effect of a large garden so adorned be easily conceived. Casaubon remembered seeing in his youth, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Paris, a piece of work of this kind which was so extensive that the siege of Troy was represented, with the contending armies and their generals. Lauremborgius, a German writer on horticulture (1631), says very gravely, that since the human head becomes like a wild wood unless it be kept trimmed, so do plants require to be treated by gardeners for the removal of their rude ungainly luxuriance. He mentions a garden near Chartres where the seven wise men of Greece, the three Graces, the labours of Hercules, and the heathen gods at a banquet, were excellently represented, with appropriate inscriptions framed out of living box. "When I beheld these things," he exclaims, "I was astonished at the industry of man, which is able to conquer all difficulties!" The same writer speaks of Hampton Court (Hampton Kurtus) with approbation; for there existed then in the gardens the figures of animals, the insignia of the English kings, and many other things, cut in privet. Lauremborgius has given students of the art some topiary figures for their consideration, such as a crane, and a man attacking a bear followed by a dog.
Old Leland refers to a garden near Towton, where lived a prebendary of York, "possessed of a goodly orchard with walks opere topiario." He also mentions "the exceedingly fair gardens within and orchards without the mote" of Wreschill Castle, an ancient seat of the Percys, where were "mounts opere topiario written about with degrees like turning of cockill shells to cum to the top without pain." In René Rapin's essay on gardening (1672), we are told that the forms into which box could be shaped were past counting, for the topiary art had then arrived at perfection, the gardeners of his time being far superior therein to their predecessors. In a poem by the same writer, entitled Horti, he sings of a chess-board with its pieces represented in box. In Dr Plot's Natural History of Staffordshire (1686) will be found some account of "the pleasant walks and topiary works" then extant in that county. "In the garden at Brerewood," said he, "is a yew-tree that, from divers branches issuing out of it about a yard from the
ground, forms a fair, spacious arbour of a square figure, each side, without measuring, about five yards, but within not exceeding above ten feet, cut on the top with loop and crest, like the battlements of a tower adorned at each corner with a pinnacle, over which is wrought a canopy out of the middle branches about two yards in diameter, which is carried up again to a lesser gradation, and then terminates at the top in a smaller pinnacle. There is also near the pale inclosing the hort-yard a fine yew-tree cut up gradually from greater to lesser rounds to the number of twenty, in which sort of ornament the people of this country seem to take great delight, there being others of twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three stories high.1 A yew-tree is also described which was trimmed into the shape of a wren's nest, capacious enough to receive a man to sit on a seat made within it. Something of this sort it was, probably, in which Maria, "the youngest wren of nine," hatched her plot against the solemn, overweening Malvolio. "Get ye all three into the box-tree," said she to her confederates, "close, in the name of jesting."
Besides the construction of shapes which have been spoken of, "l'adroit ciseau"2 was called into play for the purpose of forming those tall evergreen hedges which divided alley from alley in the "curious knotted gardens" of our ancestors.
"They rose by measure, and by rule they grew."3
Of "stately arched hedges" Bacon approved, and an old garden was not complete unless it contained a long arcade of foliage to screen from sun or shower the dames and cavaliers of the time. At Sayes Court there was a splendid hedge, the destruction of which Evelyn mourned over when the place was in the possession of Peter the Russian Czar. Butler, in describing "the fringe and tassel" adorning the chin of Sir Hudibras, which he belathered with so much wit, declared that—
"No topiary hedge of quick-set
Was e'er more neatly cut or thick set,
That made beholders more admire
Than china plate that's made of wire."
In process of time, however, topiary work fell out of estimation, and a more natural style of gardening came into fashion. Lord Bacon passed sentence upon tree-sculpture with judicial solemnity in this concise emphatic language:—"I, for my part, do not like images cut out in juniper or other garden stuff; they be for children." At a later period, Addison thus delivered his opinion, "Our British gardeners, instead of humouring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of scissors upon every plant and bush. For my own part, I would rather look upon a tree with all its luxuriance and diffusion of boughs and branches than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure, and cannot but fancy that an orchard in flower looks infinitely more delightful than all the little labyrinths of the most finished parterre." Pope wrote an essay in the Guardian in which he assailed with keen satire the prevailing affectation: "I know an eminent cook who beautified his country seat with a coronation-dinner in greens, where you see the champion flourishing on horseback at one end of the table, and the queen in perpetual youth at the other." Some of the handiwork of a virtuoso gardener was then described—for instance, St George in box, his arm scarce long enough, but will be in a condition to strike the dragon by next April. A green dragon of the same, with a tail of ground ivy for the present. A pair of giants stunted, to be sold cheap. A quickset hog shot up into a porcupine by being forgot a week in rainy weather.
Few examples of these old-fashioned gardens now re-
main in the land. There is an arcade of beech at Hampton Court which excites the attention of visitors; but the numerous figures in foliage which the gardens once contained have vanished. Indeed, when we have mentioned the grounds of Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, Stonyhurst in Lancashire, and Levens Hall in Westmoreland, we have almost exhausted the list of places where those of the present generation can see instances on a considerable scale of the quaint gardening of a bygone age—a style which agreed so well with the gable-ends and curious irregularities of antique mansions.
"The sidelong walls
Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms
Trimm'd into high arcades; the tonsile box,
Wove in mosaic mode of many a curl
Around the figured carpet of the lawn." (J. Y. J.)