Chapter II: Preface (2)

"The country hath his recreations, the city his several gymnics and exercises, May games, feasts, wakes, and merry meetings to solace themselves; the very being in the country; that life itself is a sufficient recreation to some men, to enjoy such pleasures, as those old patriarchs did. Dioclesian, the emperor, was so much affected with it, that he gave over his sceptre, and turned gardener. Constantine wrote twenty books of husbandry. Lysander, when ambassadors came to see him, bragged of nothing more than of his orchard, _hi sunt ordines mei_. What shall I say of Cincinnatus, Cato, Tully, and many such? how they have been pleased with it, to prune, plant, inoculate and graft, to show so many several kinds of pears, apples, plums, peaches, &c."

The Romans of all ranks made use of flowers as ornaments and emblems, but they were not generally so fond of directing or assisting the gardener, or taking the spade or hoe into their own hands, as are the British peasantry, gentry and nobility of the present day. They were not amateur Florists. They prized highly their fruit trees and pastures and cool grottoes and umbrageous groves; but they expended comparatively little time, skill or taste upon the flower-garden. Even their love of nature, though thoroughly genuine as far as it went, did not imply that minute and exact knowledge of her charms which characterizes some of our best British poets. They had no Thompson or Cowper. Their country seats were richer in architectural than floral beauty. Tully's Tuscan Villa, so fondly and minutely described by the proprietor himself, would appear to little advantage in the eyes of a true worshipper of Flora, if compared with Pope's retreat at Twickenham. The ancients had a taste for the _rural_, not for the _gardenesque_, nor perhaps even for the _picturesque_. The English have a taste for all three. Hence they have good landscape-gardeners and first-rate landscape-painters. The old Romans had neither. But though, some of our Spitalfields weavers have shown a deeper love, and perhaps even a finer taste, for flowers, than were exhibited by the citizens of Rome, abundant evidence is furnished to us by the poets in all ages and in all countries that nature, in some form or another has ever charmed the eye and the heart of man. The following version of a famous passage in Virgil, especially the lines in Italics, may give the English reader some idea of a Roman's dream of

RURAL HAPPINESS.

Ah! happy Swains! if they their bliss but knew,
Whom, far from boisterous war, Earth's bosom true
With easy food supplies. If they behold
No lofty dome its gorgeous gates unfold
And pour at morn from all its chambers wide
Of flattering visitants the mighty tide;
Nor gaze on beauteous columns richly wrought,
Or tissued robes, or busts from Corinth brought;
Nor their white wool with Tyrian poison soil,
Nor taint with Cassia's bark their native oil;
_Yet peace is theirs; a life true bliss that yields;
And various wealth; leisure mid ample fields,
Grottoes, and living lakes, and vallies green,
And lowing herds; and 'neath a sylvan screen,
Delicious slumbers. There the lawn and cave
With beasts of chase abound._ The young ne'er crave
A prouder lot; their patient toil is cheered;
Their Gods are worshipped and their sires revered;
And there when Justice passed from earth away
She left the latest traces of her sway.

D.L.R.

Lord Bacon was perhaps the first Englishman who endeavored to reform the old system of English gardening, and to show that it was contrary to good taste and an insult to nature. "As for making knots or figures," he says, "with divers colored earths, that may lie under the windows of the house on that side on which the garden stands, they be but toys: you may see as good sights many times in tarts." Bacon here alludes, I suppose, to the old Dutch fashion of dividing flowerbeds into many compartments, and instead of filling them with flowers, covering one with red brick dust, another with charcoal, a third with yellow sand, a fourth with chalk, a fifth with broken China, and others with green glass, or with spars and ores. But Milton, in his exquisite description of the garden of Eden, does not allude to the same absurd fashion when he speaks of "curious knots,"

Which not nice art,
In beds and _curious knots_, but nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain.

By these _curious knots_ the poet seems to allude, not to figures of "divers colored earth," but to the artificial and complicated arrangements and divisions of flowers and flower-beds.

Though Bacon went not quite so freely to nature as our latest landscape-gardeners have done, he made the _first step_ in the right direction and deserves therefore the compliment which Mason has paid him in his poem of _The English Garden_.

On thy realm
Philosophy his sovereign lustre spread;
Yet did he deign to light with casual glance
The wilds of Taste, Yes, sagest Verulam,
'Twas thine to banish from the royal groves
Each childish vanity of crisped knot[008]

And sculptured foliage; to the lawn restore
Its ample space, and bid it feast the sight
With verdure pure, unbroken, unabridged;
For verdure soothes the eye, as roseate sweets
The smell, or music's melting strains the ear.

Yes--"_verdure soothes the eye_:"--and the mind too. Bacon himself observes, that "nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn." Mason slightly qualifies his commendation of "the sage" by admitting that he had not quite completed his emancipation from the bad taste of his day.

Witness his high arched hedge
In pillored state by carpentry upborn,
With colored mirrors decked and prisoned birds.
But, when our step has paced the proud parterre,
And reached the heath, then Nature glads our eye
Sporting in all her lovely carelessness,
There smiles in varied tufts the velvet rose,
There flaunts the gadding woodbine, swells the ground
In gentle hillocks, and around its sides
Through blossomed shades the secret pathway steals.

_The English Garden_.

In one of the notes to _The English Garden_ it is stated that "Bacon was the prophet, Milton the herald of modern Gardening; and Addison, Pope, and Kent the champions of true taste." Kent was by profession both a Painter and a Landscape-Gardener. Addison who had a pretty little retreat at Bilton, near Rugby, evinces in most of his occasional allusions to gardens a correct judgment. He complains that even in _his_ time our British gardeners, instead of humouring nature, loved to deviate from it as much as possible. The system of verdant sculpture had not gone out of fashion. Our trees still rose in cones, globes, and pyramids. The work of the scissors was on every plant and bush. It was Pope, however, who did most to bring the topiary style into contempt and to encourage a more natural taste, by his humorous paper in the _Guardian_ and his poetical Epistle to the Earl of Burlington. Gray, the poet, observes in one of his letters, that "our skill in gardening, or rather laying out grounds, is the only taste we can call our own; the only proof of original talent in matters of pleasure. This is no small honor to us;" he continues, "since neither France nor Italy, has ever had the least notion of it." "Whatever may have been reported, whether truly or falsely" (says a contributor to _The World_) "of the Chinese gardens, it is certain that we are the first of the Europeans who have founded this taste; and we have been so fortunate in the genius of those who have had the direction of some of the finest spots of ground, that we may now boast a success equal to that profusion of expense which has been destined to promote the rapid progress of this happy enthusiasm. Our gardens are already the astonishment of foreigners, and, in proportion as they accustom themselves to consider and understand them will become their admiration." The periodical from which this is taken was published exactly a century ago, and the writer's prophecy has been long verified. Foreigners send to us for gardeners to help them to lay out their grounds in the English fashion. And we are told by the writer of an interesting article on gardens, in the _Quarterly Review_, that "the lawns at Paris, to say nothing of Naples, are regularly irrigated to keep up even the semblance of English verdure; and at the gardens of Versailles, and Caserta, near Naples, the walks have been supplied from the Kensington gravel-pits." "It is not probably known," adds the same writer, "that among our exportations every year is a large quantity of evergreens for the markets of France and Germany, and that there are some nurserymen almost wholly engaged in this branch of trade."

Pomfret, a poet of small powers, if a poet at all, has yet contrived to produce a popular composition in verse--_The Choice_--because he has touched with great good fortune on some of the sweetest domestic hopes and enjoyments of his countrymen.

If Heaven the grateful liberty would give
That I might choose my method how to live;
And all those hours propitious Fate should lend
In blissful ease and satisfaction spend;
Near some fair town I'd have a private seat
Built uniform; not little; nor too great:
Better if on a rising ground it stood,
On this side fields, on that a neighbouring wood.

_The Choice_.

Pomfret perhaps illustrates the general taste when he places his garden "_near some fair town_." Our present laureate, though a truly inspired poet, and a genuine lover of Nature even in her remotest retreats, has the garden of his preference, "_not quite beyond the busy world_."

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love,
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And sitting muffled in dark leaves you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies
A league of grass.

Even "sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh" are often pleasing when mellowed by the space of air through which they pass.

'Tis distance lends enchantment to the _sound_.

Shelley, in one of his sweetest poems, speaking of a scene in the neighbourhood of Naples, beautifully says:--

Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
_The city's voice itself is soft_, like solitude's.

No doubt the feeling that we are _near_ the crowd but not _in_ it, may deepen the sense of our own happy rural seclusion and doubly endear that pensive leisure in which we can "think down hours to moments," and in

This our life, exempt from public haunt,
Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

_Shakespeare_.

Besides, to speak truly, few men, however studious or philosophical, desire a total isolation from the world. It is pleasant to be able to take a sort of side glance at humanity, even when we are most in love with nature, and to feel that we can join our fellow creatures again when the social feeling returns upon us. Man was not made to live alone. Cowper, though he clearly loved retirement and a garden, did not desire to have the pleasure entirely to himself. "Grant me," he says, "a friend in my retreat."

To whom to whisper solitude is sweet.

Cowper lived and died a bachelor. In the case of a married man and a father, garden delights are doubled by the presence of the family and friends, if wife and children happen to be what they should be, and the friends are genuine and genial.

All true poets delight in gardens. The truest that ever lived spent his latter days at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. He had a spacious and beautiful garden. Charles Knight tells us that "the Avon washed its banks; and within its enclosures it had its sunny terraces and green lawns, its pleached alleys and honeysuckle bowers," In this garden Shakespeare planted with his own hands his celebrated Mulberry tree. It was a noble specimen of the black Mulberry introduced into England in 1548[009]. In 1605, James I. issued a Royal edict recommending the cultivation of silkworms and offering packets of mulberry seeds to those amongst his subjects who were willing to sow them. Shakespeare's tree was planted in 1609. Mr. Loudon, observes that the black Mulberry has been known from the earliest records of antiquity and that it is twice mentioned in the Bible: namely, in the second Book of Samuel and in the Psalms. When New Place was in the possession of Sir Hough Clopton, who was proud of its interesting association with the history of our great poet, not only were Garrick and Macklin most hospitably entertained under the Mulberry tree, but all strangers on a proper application were admitted to a sight of it. But when Sir Hough Clopton was succeeded by the Reverend Francis Gastrell, that gentleman, to save himself the trouble of showing the tree to visitors, had "the gothic barbarity" to cut down and root up that interesting--indeed _sacred_ memorial--of the Pride of the British Isles. The people of Stratford were so enraged at this sacrilege that they broke Mr. Gastrell's windows. That prosaic personage at last found the place too hot for him, and took his departure from a town whose inhabitants "doated on his very absence;" but before he went he completed the fall sum of his sins against good taste and good feeling by pulling to the ground the house in which Shakespeare had lived and died. This was done, it is said, out of sheer spite to the towns-people, with some of whom Mr. Gastrell had had a dispute about the rate at which the house was taxed. His change of residence was no great relief to him, for the whole British public felt sorely aggrieved, and wherever he went he was peppered with all sorts of squibs and satires. He "slid into verse," and "hitched in a rhyme."

Sacred to ridicule his whole life long,
And the sad burden of a merry song.

Thomas Sharp, a watchmaker, got possession of the fragments of Shakespeare's Mulberry tree, and worked them into all sorts of elegant ornaments and toys, and disposed of them at great prices. The corporation of Stratford presented Garrick with the freedom of the town in a box made of the wood of this famous tree, and the compliment seems to have suggested to him his public festival or pageant in honor of the poet. This Jubilee, which was got up with great zeal, and at great expense and trouble, was attended by vast throngs of the admirers of Shakespeare from all parts of the kingdom. It was repeated on the stage and became so popular as a theatrical exhibition that it was represented night after night for more than half a season to crowded audiences.

Upon the subject of gardens, let us hear what has been said by the self-styled "melancholy Cowley." When in the smoky city pent, amidst the busy hum of men, he sighed unceasingly for some green retreat. As he paced the crowded thorough-fares of London, he thought of the velvet turf and the pure air of the country. His imagination carried him into secluded groves or to the bank of a murmuring river, or into some trim and quiet garden. "I never," he says, "had any other desire so strong and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life only to the culture of them and the study of nature," The late Miss Mitford, whose writings breathe so freshly of the nature that she loved so dearly, realized for herself a similar desire. It is said that she had the cottage of a peasant with the garden of a Duchess. Cowley is not contented with expressing in plain prose his appreciation of garden enjoyments. He repeatedly alludes to them in verse.

Thus, thus (and this deserved great Virgil's praise)
The old Corycian yeoman passed his days;
Thus his wise life Abdolonymus spent;
Th' ambassadors, which the great emperor sent
To offer him a crown, with wonder found
The reverend gardener, hoeing of his ground;
Unwillingly and slow and discontent
From his loved cottage to a throne he went;
And oft he stopped, on his triumphant way:
And oft looked back: and oft was heard to say
Not without sighs, Alas! I there forsake
A happier kingdom than I go to take.

_Lib. IV. Plantarum_.

Here is a similar allusion by the same poet to the delights which great men amongst the ancients have taken in a rural retirement.

Methinks, I see great Dioclesian walk
In the Salonian garden's noble shade
Which by his own imperial hands was made,
I see him smile, methinks, as he does talk
With the ambassadors, who come in vain
To entice him to a throne again.

"If I, my friends," said he, "should to you show
All the delights which in these gardens grow,
'Tis likelier much that you should with me stay,
Than 'tis that you should carry me away:
And trust me not, my friends, if every day
I walk not here with more delight,

Than ever, after the most happy sight
In triumph to the Capitol I rode,
To thank the gods, and to be thought myself almost a god,"

_The Garden_.

Cowley does not omit the important moral which a garden furnishes.

Where does the wisdom and the power divine
In a more bright and sweet reflection shine?
Where do we finer strokes and colors see
Of the Creator's real poetry.
Than when we with attention look
Upon the third day's volume of the book?
If we could open and intend our eye
_We all, like Moses, might espy,
E'en in a bush, the radiant Deity_.

In Leigh Hunt's charming book entitled _The Town_, I find the following notice of the partiality of poets for houses with gardens attached to them:--

"It is not surprizing that _garden-houses_ as they were called; should have formerly abounded in Holborn, in Bunhill Row, and other (at that time) suburban places. We notice the fact, in order to observe _how fond the poets were of occupying houses of this description. Milton seems to have made a point of having one_. The only London residence of Chapman which is known, was in Old Street Road; doubtless at that time a rural suburb. Beaumont and Fletcher's house, on the Surrey side of the Thames, (for they lived as well as wrote together,) most probably had a garden; and Dryden's house in Gerard Street looked into the garden of the mansion built by the Earls of Leicester. A tree, or even a flower, put in a window in the streets of a great city, (and the London citizens, to their credit, are fond of flowers,) affects the eye something in the same way as the hand-organs, which bring unexpected music to the ear. They refresh the common-places of life, shed a harmony through the busy discord, and appeal to those first sources of emotion, which are associated with the remembrance of all that is young and innocent."

Milton must have been a passionate lover of flowers and flower-gardens or he could never have exhibited the exquisite taste and genial feeling which characterize all the floral allusions and descriptions with which so much of his poetry is embellished. He lived for some time in a house in Westminster over-looking the Park. The same house was tenanted by Jeremy Bentham for forty years. It would be difficult to meet with any two individuals of more opposite temperaments than the author of _Paradise Lost_ and the Utilitarian Philosopher. There is or was a stone in the wall at the end of the garden inscribed TO THE PRINCE OF POETS. Two beautiful cotton trees overarched the inscription, "and to show" says Hazlitt, (who subsequently lived in the same house himself,) "how little the refinements of taste or fancy entered Bentham's system, he proposed at one time to cut down these beautiful trees, to convert the garden, where he had breathed an air of truth and heaven for near half a century, into a paltry Chreistomathic School, and to make Milton's house (the cradle of _Paradise Lost_) a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster to pass backwards and forwards to it with their cloven hoofs!"

No poet, ancient or modern, has described a garden on a large scale in so noble a style as Milton. He has anticipated the finest conceptions of the latest landscape-gardeners, and infinitely surpassed all the accounts we have met with of the gardens of the olden time before us. His Paradise is a

Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned
Or of revived Adonis or renowned
Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son
Or that, not mystic, where the sapient King
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse[010]

The description is too long to quote entire, but I must make room for a delightful extract. Familiar as it must be to all lovers of poetry, who will object to read it again and again? Genuine poetry is like a masterpiece of the painter's art:--we can gaze with admiration for the hundredth time on a noble picture. The mind and the eye are never satiated with the truly beautiful. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."

PARADISE.[011]

So on he fares, and to the border comes
Of Eden, where delicious Paradise,
Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green,
As with a rural mound, the champaign head
Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides
With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild,
Access denied: and overhead up grew
Insuperable height of loftiest shade,
Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm,
A sylvan scene; and as, the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woody theatre
Of stateliest view. Yet higher than their tops,
The verdurous wall of Paradise up-sprung:
Which to our general sire gave prospect large
Into his nether empire neighbouring round;
And higher than that wall a circling row
Of goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit,
Blossoms and fruits at once, of golden hue,
Appear'd, with gay enamell'd colours mix'd;
On which the sun more glad impress'd his beams,
Than on fair evening cloud, or humid bow.
When God hath shower'd the earth; so lovely seem'd
That landscape: and of pure now purer air
Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires
Vernal delight and joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair: now gentle gales,
Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense
Native perfumes and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils. As when to them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabean odours from the spicy shore
Of Araby the Blest; with such delay
Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league
Cheer'd with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiles.

* * * * *

Southward through Eden went a river large,
Nor changed his course, but through the shaggy hill
Pass'd underneath ingulf'd; for God had thrown
That mountain as his garden mould, high raised
Upon the rapid current, which through veins
Of porous earth with kindly thirst up-drawn,
Rose a fresh fountain, and with many a rill
Water'd the garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the nether flood,
Which from his darksome passage now appears;
And now, divided into four main streams,
Runs diverse, wandering many a famous realm
And country, whereof here needs no account;
But rather to tell how, if art could tell,
How from that sapphire fount the crisped brooks,
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,
With mazy error under pendent shades,
Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice art
In beds and curious knots, but nature boon
Pour'd forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain,
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierced shade
Imbrown'd the noontide bowers; thus was this place
A happy rural seat of various view;
Groves whose rich, trees wept odorous gums and balm;
Others whose fruit, burnish'd with golden rind,
Hung amiable, Hesperian fables true,
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed;
Or palmy hillock, or the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread her store,
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose:
Another side, umbrageous grots and caves
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling vine
Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; meanwhile murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, dispersed, or in a lake,
That to the fringed bank with myrtle crown'd
Her crystal mirror holds, unite their streams.
The birds their quire apply; airs, vernal airs,
Breathing the smell of field and grove attune,
The trembling leaves, while universal Pan,
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,
Led on the eternal Spring.

Pope in his grounds at Twickenham, and Shenstone in his garden farm of the Leasowes, taught their countrymen to understand how much taste and refinement of soul may be connected with the laying out of gardens and the cultivation of flowers. I am sorry to learn that the famous retreats of these poets are not now what they were. The lovely nest of the little Nightingale of Twickenham has fallen into vulgar hands. And when Mr. Loudon visited (in 1831) the once beautiful grounds of Shenstone, he "found them in a state of indescribable neglect and ruin."

Pope said that of all his works that of which he was proudest was his garden. It was of but five acres, or perhaps less, but to this he is said to have given a charming variety. He enumerates amongst the friends who assisted him in the improvement of his grounds, the gallant Earl of Peterborough "whose lightnings pierced the Iberian lines."

Know, all the distant din that world can keep,
Rolls o'er my grotto, and but soothes my sleep.
There my retreat the best companions grace
Chiefs out of war and statesmen out of place.
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul;
And he whose lightnings pierced the Iberian lines
Now forms my quincunx and now ranks my vines;
Or tames the genius of the stubborn plain
Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain.

Frederick Prince of Wales took a lively interest in Pope's tasteful Tusculanum and made him a present of some urns or vases either for his "laurel circus or to terminate his points." His famous grotto, which he is so fond of alluding to, was excavated to avoid an inconvenience. His property lying on both sides of the public highway, he contrived his highly ornamented passage under the road to preserve privacy and to connect the two portions of his estate.

The poet has given us in one of his letters a long and lively description of his subterranean embellishments. But his verse will live longer than his prose. He has immortalized this grotto, so radiant with spars and ores and shells, in the following poetical inscription:--

Thou, who shalt stop, where Thames' translucent wave
Shines a broad mirror through the shadowy cave,
Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distil,
And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill,
Unpolished gems no ray on pride bestow,
And latent metals innocently glow,
Approach! Great Nature studiously behold,
And eye the mine without a wish for gold
Approach--but awful! Lo, the Egerian grot,
Where, nobly pensive, ST JOHN sat and thought,
Where British sighs from dying WYNDHAM stole,
And the bright flame was shot thro' MARCHMONT'S soul;
Let such, such only, tread this sacred floor
Who dare to love their country, and be poor.

Horace Walpole, speaking of the poet's garden, tells us that "the passing through the gloom from the grotto to the opening day, the retiring and again assembling shades, the dusky groves, the larger lawn, and the solemnity at the cypresses that led up to his mother's tomb, were managed with exquisite judgment."

Cliveden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love,

alluded to by Pope in his sketch of the character of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, though laid out by Kent, was probably improved by the poet's suggestions. Walpole seems to think that the beautiful grounds at Rousham, laid out for General Dormer, were planned on the model of the garden at Twickenham, at least the opening and retiring "shades of Venus's Vale." And these grounds at Rousham were pronounced "the most engaging of all Kent's works." It is said that the design of the garden at Carlton House, was borrowed from that of Pope.

Wordsworth was correct in his observation that "Landscape gardening is a liberal art akin to the arts of poetry and painting." Walpole describes it as "an art that realizes painting and improves nature." "Mahomet," he adds, "imagined an Elysium, but Kent created many."

Pope's mansion was not a very spacious one, but it was large enough for a private gentleman of inexpensive habits. After the poet's death it was purchased by Sir William Stanhope who enlarged both the house and garden.[012] A bust of Pope, in white marble, has been placed over an arched way with the following inscription from the pen of Lord Nugent:

The humble roof, the garden's scanty line,
Ill suit the genius of the bard divine;
But fancy now displays a fairer scope
And Stanhope's plans unfold the soul of Pope.

I have not heard who set up this bust with its impudent inscription. I hope it was not Stanhope himself. I cannot help thinking that it would have been a truer compliment to the memory of Pope if the house and grounds had been kept up exactly as he had left them. Most people, I suspect, would greatly have preferred the poet's own "unfolding of his soul" to that "_unfolding_" attempted for him by a Stanhope and commemorated by a Nugent. Pope exhibited as much taste in laying out his grounds as in constructing his poems. Sir William, after his attempt to make the garden more worthy of the original designer, might just as modestly have undertaken to enlarge and improve the poetry of Pope on the plea that it did not sufficiently _unfold his soul_. A line of Lord Nugent's might in that case have been transferred from the marble bust to the printed volume:

His fancy now displays a fairer scope.

Or the enlarger and improver might have taken his motto from Shakespeare:

To my _unfolding_ lend a gracious ear.

This would have been an appropriate motto for the title-page of "_The Poems of Pope: enlarged and improved: or The Soul of the Poet Unfolded_."

But in sober truth, Pope, whether as a gardener or as a poet, required no enlarger or improver of his works. After Sir William Stanhope had left Pope's villa it came into the possession of Lord Mendip, who exhibited a proper respect for the poet's memory; but when in 1807 it was sold to the Baroness Howe, that lady pulled down the house and built another. The place subsequently came into the possession of a Mr. Young. The grounds have now no resemblance to what the taste of Pope had once made them. Even his mother's monument has been removed! Few things would have more deeply touched the heart of the poet than the anticipation of this insult to the memory of so revered a parent. His filial piety was as remarkable as his poetical genius. No passages in his works do him more honor both as a man and as a poet than those which are mellowed into a deeper tenderness of sentiment and a softer and sweeter music by his domestic affections. There are probably few readers of English poetry who have not the following lines by heart,

Me, let the tender office long engage
To rock the cradle of reposing age;
With lenient arts extend a mother's breath;
Make langour smile, and smooth the bed of death;
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep at least one parent from the sky.

In a letter to Swift (dated March 29, 1731) begun by Lord Bolingbroke and concluded by Pope, the latter speaks thus touchingly of his dear old parent:

"My Lord has spoken justly of his lady; why not I of my mother? Yesterday was her birth-day, now entering on the ninety-first year of her age; her memory much diminished, but her senses very little hurt, her sight and hearing good; she sleeps not ill, eats moderately, drinks water, says her prayers; this is all she does. I have reason to thank God for continuing so long to me a very good and tender parent, and for allowing me to exercise for some years those cares which are now as necessary to her, as hers have been to me."

Pope lost his mother two years, two months, and a few days after the date of this letter. Three days after her death he entreated Richardson, the painter, to take a sketch of her face, as she lay in her coffin: and for this purpose Pope somewhat delayed her interment. "I thank God," he says, "her death was as easy as her life was innocent; and as it cost her not a groan, nor even a sigh, there is yet upon her countenance such an expression of tranquillity, nay almost of pleasure, that it is even amiable to behold it. It would afford the finest image of a saint expired, that ever painting drew, and it would be the greatest obligation which even that obliging art could ever bestow upon a friend if you would come and sketch it for me." The writer adds, "I shall hope to see you this evening, as late as you will, or to-morrow morning as early, _before this winter flower is faded_."

On the small obelisk in the garden, erected by Pope to the memory of his mother, he placed the following simple and pathetic inscription.

AH! EDITHA!
MATRUM OPTIMA!
MULIERUM AMANTISSIMA!
VALE!

I wonder that any one could have had the heart to remove or to destroy so interesting a memorial.

It is said that Pope planted his celebrated weeping willow at Twickenham with his own hands, and that it was the first of its particular species introduced into England. Happening to be with Lady Suffolk when she received a parcel from Spain, he observed that it was bound with green twigs which looked as if they might vegetate. "Perhaps," said he, "these may produce something that we have not yet in England." He tried a cutting, and it succeeded. The tree was removed by some person as barbarous as the reverend gentleman who cut down Shakespeare's Mulberry Tree. The Willow was destroyed for the same reason, as the Mulberry Tree--because the owner was annoyed at persons asking to see it. The Weeping Willow

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream,[013]

has had its interest with people in general much increased by its association with the history of Napoleon in the Island of St. Helena. The tree whose boughs seemed to hang so fondly over his remains has now its scions in all parts of the world. Few travellers visited the tomb without taking a small cutting of the Napoleon Willow for cultivation in their own land. Slips of the Willow at Twickenham, like those of the Willow at St. Helena, have also found their way into many countries. In 1789 the Empress of Russia had some of them planted in her garden at St. Petersburgh.

Mr. Loudon tells us that there is an old _oak_ in Binfield Wood, Windsor Forest, which is called _Pope's Oak_, and which bears the inscription "HERE POPE SANG:"[014] but according to general tradition it was a _beech_ tree, under which Pope wrote his "Windsor Forest." It is said that as that tree was decayed, Lady Gower had the inscription alluded to carved upon another tree near it. Perhaps the substituted tree was an oak.

I may here mention that in the Vale of Avoca there is a tree celebrated as that under which Thomas Moore wrote the verses entitled "The meeting of the Waters."

The allusion to _Pope's Oak_ reminds me that Chaucer is said to have planted three oak trees in Donnington Park near Newbury. Not one of them is now, I believe, in existence. There is an oak tree in Windsor Forest above 1000 years old. In the hollow of this tree twenty people might be accommodated with standing room. It is called _King's Oak_: it was William the Conqueror's favorite tree. _Herne's Oak_ in Windsor Park, is said by some to be still standing, but it is described as a mere anatomy.

----An old oak whose boughs are mossed with age,
And high top bald with dry antiquity.

_As You Like it_.

"It stretches out its bare and sapless branches," says Mr. Jesse, "like the skeleton arms of some enormous giant, and is almost fearful in its decay." _Herne's Oak_, as every one knows, is immortalised by Shakespeare, who has spread its fame over many lands.

There is an old tale goes that Herne the hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns,
And there he blasts the trees, and takes the cattle;
And makes milch cows yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
You have heard of such a spirit; and well you know,
The superstitious, idle-headed eld
Received, and did deliver to our age,
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.

_Merry Wives of Windsor_.

"Herne, the hunter" is said to have hung himself upon one of the branches of this tree, and even,

----Yet there want not many that do fear,
In deep of night to walk by this Herne's Oak.

_Merry Wives of Windsor_.

It was not long ago visited by the King of Prussia to whom Shakespeare had rendered it an object of great interest.

It is unpleasant to add that there is considerable doubt and dispute as to its identity. Charles Knight and a Quarterly Reviewer both maintain that _Herne's Oak_ was cut down with a number of other old trees in obedience to an order from George the Third when he was not in his right mind, and that his Majesty deeply regretted the order he had given when he found that the most interesting tree in his Park had been destroyed. Mr. Jesse, in his _Gleanings in Natural History_, says that after some pains to ascertain the truth, he is convinced that this story is not correct, and that the famous old tree is still standing. He adds that George the Fourth often alluded to the story and said that though one of the trees cut down was supposed to have been _Herne's Oak_, it was not so in reality. George the Third, it is said, once called the attention of Mr. Ingalt, the manager of Windsor Home Park to a particular tree, and said "I brought you here to point out this tree to you. I commit it to your especial charge; and take care that no damage is ever done to it. I had rather that every tree in the park should be cut down than that this tree should be hurt. _This is Hernes Oak_."

Sir Philip Sidney's Oak at Penshurst mentioned by Ben Jonson--

That taller tree, of which the nut was set
At his great birth, where all the Muses met--

is still in existence. It is thirty feet in circumference. Waller also alludes to

Yonder tree which stands the sacred mark
Of noble Sidney's birth.

Yardley Oak, immortalized by Cowper, is now in a state of decay.

Time made thee what thou wert--king of the woods!
And time hath made thee what thou art--a cave
For owls to roost in.

_Cowper_.

The tree is said to be at least fifteen hundred years old. It cannot hold its present place much longer; but for many centuries to come it will

Live in description and look green in song.

It stands on the grounds of the Marquis of Northampton; and to prevent people from cutting off and carrying away pieces of it as relics, the following notice has been painted on a board and nailed to the tree:--"_Out of respect to the memory of the poet Cowper, the Marquis of Northampton is particularly desirous of preserving this Oak_."

Lord Byron, in early life, planted an oak in the garden at Newstead and indulged the fancy, that as that flourished so should he. The oak has survived the poet, but it will not outlive the memory of its planter or even the boyish verses which he addressed to it.

Pope observes, that "a tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation robes." Yet probably the poet had never seen any tree larger than a British oak. What would he have thought of the Baobab tree in Abyssinia, which measures from 80 to 120 feet in girth, and sometimes reaches the age of five thousand years. We have no such sylvan patriarch in Europe. The oldest British tree I have heard of, is a yew tree of Fortingall in Scotland, of which the age is said to be two thousand five hundred years. If trees had long memories and could converse with man, what interesting chapters these survivors of centuries might add to the history of the world!

Pope was not always happy in his Twickenham Paradise. His rural delights were interrupted for a time by an unrequited passion for the beautiful and highly-gifted but eccentric Lady Mary Wortley Montague.

Ah! friend, 'tis true--this truth you lovers know;
In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow;
In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes
Of hanging mountains and of sloping greens;
Joy lives not here, to happier seats it flies,
And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes.

What are the gay parterre, the chequered shade,
The morning bower, the evening colonnade,
But soft recesses of uneasy minds,
To sigh unheard in to the passing winds?

So the struck deer, in some sequestered part,
Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart;
He, stretched unseen, in coverts hid from day,
Bleeds drop by drop, and pants his life away.

These are exquisite lines, and have given delight to innumerable readers, but they gave no delight to Lady Mary. In writing to her sister, the Countess of Mar, then at Paris, she says in allusion to these "most musical, most melancholy" verses--"_I stifled them here; and I beg they may die the same death at Paris_." It is not, however, quite so easy a thing as Lady Mary seemed to think, to "stifle" such poetry as Pope's.

Pope's notions respecting the laying out of gardens are well expressed in the following extract from the fourth Epistle of his Moral Essays.[015] This fourth Epistle was addressed, as most readers will remember, to the accomplished Lord Burlington, who, as Walpole says, "had every quality of a genius and an artist, except envy. Though his own designs were more chaste and classic than Kent's, he entertained him in his house till his death, and was more studious to extend his friend's fame than his own."

Something there is more needful than expense,
And something previous e'en to taste--'tis sense;
Good sense, which only is the gift of Heaven,
And though no science fairly worth the seven;
A light, which in yourself you must perceive;
Jones and Le Notre have it not to give.
To build, or plant, whatever you intend,
To rear the column or the arch to bend;
To swell the terrace, or to sink the grot;
In all let Nature never be forgot.
But treat the goddess like a modest fair,
Nor over dress nor leave her wholly bare;
Let not each beauty every where be spied,
Where half the skill is decently to hide.
He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,
Surprizes, varies, and conceals the bounds.
_Consult the genius of the place in all_;[016]
That tells the waters or to rise or fall;
Or helps the ambitious hill the heavens to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods and varies shades from shades;
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.
Still follow sense, of every art the soul;
Parts answering parts shall slide into a whole,
Spontaneous beauties all around advance,
Start e'en from difficulty, strike from chance;
Nature shall join you; time shall make it grow
A work to wonder at--perhaps a STOWE.[017]
Without it proud Versailles![018] Thy glory falls;
And Nero's terraces desert their walls.
The vast parterres a thousand hands shall make,
Lo! Cobham comes and floats them with a lake;
Or cut wide views through mountains to the plain,
You'll wish your hill or sheltered seat again.

Pope is in most instances singularly happy in his compliments, but the allusion to STOWE--as "_a work to wonder at_"--has rather an equivocal appearance, and so also has the mention of Lord Cobham, the proprietor of the place. In the first draught of the poem, the name of Bridgeman was inserted where Cobham's now stands, but as Bridgeman mistook the compliment for a sneer, the poet thought the landscape-gardener had proved himself undeserving of the intended honor, and presented the second-hand compliment to the peer. The grounds at Stowe, more praised by poets than any other private estate in England, extend to 400 acres. There are many other fine estates in our country of far greater extent, but of less celebrity. Some of them are much too extensive, perhaps, for true enjoyment. The Earl of Leicester, when he had completed his seat at Holkham, observed, that "It was a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's country. I look round; not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the Giant of Giant-castle and have ate up all my neighbours." The Earl must have felt that the political economy of Goldsmith in his _Deserted Village_ was not wholly the work of imagination.

Sweet smiling village! Loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen
And desolation saddens all the green,--
_One only master grasps thy whole domain_.

* * * * *

Where then, ah! where shall poverty reside,
To scape the pressure of contiguous pride?

"Hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton," as Lamb calls him, describes Stowe as a Paradise.

ON LORD COBHAM'S GARDEN.

It puzzles much the sage's brains
Where Eden stood of yore,
Some place it in Arabia's plains,
Some say it is no more.

But Cobham can these tales confute,
As all the curious know;
For he hath proved beyond dispute,
That Paradise is STOWE.

Thomson also calls the place a paradise:

Ye Powers
That o'er the garden and the rural seat
Preside, which shining through the cheerful land
In countless numbers blest Britannia sees;
O, lead me to the wide-extended walks,
_The fair majestic paradise of Stowe!_
Not Persian Cyrus on Ionia's shore
E'er saw such sylvan scenes; such various art
By genius fired, such ardent genius tamed
By cool judicious art, that in the strife
All-beauteous Nature fears to be out-done.

The poet somewhat mars the effect of this compliment to the charms of Stowe, by making it a matter of regret that the owner

His verdant files
Of ordered trees should here inglorious range,
Instead of squadrons flaming o'er the field,
And long embattled hosts.

This representation of rural pursuits as inglorious, a sentiment so out of keeping with his subject, is soon after followed rather inconsistently, by a sort of paraphrase of Virgil's celebrated picture of rural felicity, and some of Thomson's own thoughts on the advantages of a retreat from active life.

Oh, knew he but his happiness, of men
The happiest he! Who far from public rage
Deep in the vale, with a choice few retired
Drinks the pure pleasures of the rural life, &c.

Then again:--

Let others brave the flood in quest of gain
And beat for joyless months, the gloomy wave.
_Let such as deem it glory to destroy,
Rush into blood, the sack of cities seek;
Unpierced, exulting in the widow's wail,
The virgin's shriek and infant's trembling cry._

* * * * *

While he, from all the stormy passions free
That restless men involve, hears and _but_ hears,
At distance safe, the human tempest roar,
Wrapt close in conscious peace. The fall of kings,
The rage of nations, and the crush of states,
Move not the man, who from the world escaped,
In still retreats and flowery solitudes,
To nature's voice attends, from month to month,
And day to day, through the revolving year;
Admiring sees her in her every shape;
Feels all her sweet emotions at his heart;
Takes what she liberal gives, nor asks for more.
He, when young Spring, protudes the bursting gems
Marks the first bud, and sucks the healthful gale
Into his freshened soul; her genial hour
He full enjoys, and not a beauty blows
And not an opening blossom breathes in vain.

Thomson in his description of Lord Townshend's seat of Rainham--another English estate once much celebrated and still much admired--exclaims:

Such are thy beauties, Rainham, such the haunts
Of angels, in primeval guiltless days
When man, imparadised, conversed with God.

And Broome after quoting the whole description in his dedication of his own poems to Lord Townshend, observes, in the old fashioned fulsome strain, "This, my lord, is but a faint picture of the place of your retirement which no one ever enjoyed more elegantly."[019] "A faint picture!" What more would the dedicator have wished Thomson to say? Broome, if not contented with his patron's seat being described as an earthly Paradise, must have desired it to be compared with Heaven itself, and thus have left his Lordship no hope of the enjoyment of a better place than he already possessed.

Samuel Boyse, who when without a shirt to his back sat up in his bed to write verses, with his arms through two holes in his blanket, and when he went into the streets wore paper collars to conceal the sad deficiency of linen, has a poem of considerable length entitled _The Triumphs of Nature_. It is wholly devoted to a description of this magnificent garden,[020] in which, amongst other architectural ornaments, was a temple dedicated to British worthies, where the busts of Pope and Congreve held conspicuous places. I may as well give a specimen of the lines of poor Boyse. Here is his description of that part of Lord Cobham's grounds in which is erected to the Goddess of Love, a Temple containing a statue of the Venus de Medicis.

Next to the fair ascent our steps we traced,
Where shines afar the bold rotunda placed;
The artful dome Ionic columns bear
Light as the fabric swells in ambient air.
Beneath enshrined the Tuscan Venus stands
And beauty's queen the beauteous scene commands:
The fond beholder sees with glad surprize,
Streams glisten, lawns appear, and forests rise--
Here through thick shades alternate buildings break,
There through the borders steals the silver lake,
A soft variety delights the soul,
And harmony resulting crowns the whole.

Congreve in his Letter in verse addressed to Lord Cobham asks him to

Tell how his pleasing Stowe employs his time.

It would seem that the proprietor of Stowe took particular interest in the disposition of the water on his grounds. Congreve enquires

Or dost thou give the winds afar to blow
Each vexing thought, and heart-devouring woe,
And fix thy mind alone on rural scenes,
_To turn the level lawns to liquid plains_?
To raise the creeping rills from humble beds
And force the latent spring to lift their heads,
On watery columns, capitals to rear,
That mix their flowing curls with upper air?

* * * * *

Or slowly walk along the mazy wood
To meditate on all that's wise and good.

The line:--

To turn the level lawn to liquid plains--

Will remind the reader of Pope's

Lo! Cobham comes and floats them with a lake--

And it might be thought that Congreve had taken the hint from the bard of Twickenham if Congreve's poem had not preceded that of Pope. The one was published in 1729, the other in 1731.

Cowper is in the list of poets who have alluded to "Cobham's groves" and Pope's commemoration of them.

And _Cobham's groves_ and Windsor's green retreats
When Pope describes them have a thousand sweets.