My garden takes up half my daily care, HARTE. ADDISON remarked, that he considered the pleasure we take in a garden, as one of the most innocent delights in human life. Evelyn, also, said that the happiness of a person fond of his garden was preferable to what was founded on all other enjoyments. Cowley evidently was of the same opinion, for he exclaims Blest be the man (and blest he is) whome'er A little field, and little garden, feeds: All she can ask Milton, also, described the delights of a garden in the most eloquent language; and although he was unable to see what he so beautifully pourtrayed, yet his intellectual eye, his fine imagination, and his correct taste, enabled him not only to reject factitious ornaments, and artificial conceits, but to give the following beautiful description of a garden, made by the hand of Nature herself From that sapphire fount the crisped brooks, A happy rural seat of various view. Sir William Temple, in his Essay on Gardening, has the following passage. "If we believe the Scriptures," he observes, "we must allow that God Almighty esteemed the life of a man in a garden the happiest he could give him, or else he would not have placed Adam in that of Eden; it was the state of innocence and pleasure, and the life of husbandry and cities came after the fall, with guilt and labour." It is impossible, also, to read Pope's works, and not to be aware of the great delight he took in his garden, or not to perceive that he had imbibed some taste for ornamental gardening. The description of his grotto, in his letter to Mr. Blount (1725) is altogether charming. Alas! to see his garden now, divided and subdivided his walks covered with weeds- the urn he erected to the memory of his mother, with its affecting inscription, scrawled upon and defaced—and his grotto, his charming and interesting grotto, where he "found a spring* of the clearest water, which fell in a perpetual rill, that echoed through the cavern night and day," and from which, “looking down through a sloping arcade of trees, the sails on the river might be seen passing suddenly and vanishing," is now mutilated and pillaged of its shells, flints, and "simple pebbles." In addition to this devastation, how much is it to be regretted that so soon after his death his garden should have been spoilt by bad taste. When Lord Nugent wrote those well-known lines to Sir William Stanhope, on his enlargements and improvements of Pope's grounds, which I cannot but consider as equally sycophantic and ignorant But fancy now displays a fairer scope, And Stanhope's plans unfold the soul of Pope, we should rather read And Stanhope's wealth destroys the taste of Pope. Would that his villa, his garden, and his grotto, had fallen into the hands of one who would have duly appreciated them-of one who would have kept up and cherished what others have so wantonly destroyed or altered. That one is the author of the Pleasures of Memory, who not only possesses much of the genius of Pope, and all his *This spring, which had disappeared for many years, and indeed was quite forgotten, suddenly burst out last Summer, and again has become the ornament of the grotto. J. MITFORD, 1843. taste, but who has the greatest veneration for everything which belonged to that immortal poet. Horace Walpole formed a just estimate of Sir William Stanhope's bad taste, and grieved over the alterations he had made, and the sort of sacrilege he had committed. In one of his letters, he says, "I must tell you a private woe that has happened to me in my neighbourhood. Sir William Stanhope bought Pope's house and garden. The former was so small and bad, one could not avoid pardoning his hollowing out that fragment of the rock Parnassus into habitable chambers; but would you believe it, he has cut down the sacred groves themselves! In short, it was a little bit of ground of five acres, enclosed with three lanes, and seeing nothing. Pope had twisted and twirled, and rhymed and harmonized this, till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening beyond one another, and the whole surrounded with thick impenetrable woods. Sir William, by advice of his son-in-law, Mr. Ellis, has hacked and hewed these groves, wriggled a winding gravel-walk through them with an edging of shrubs, in what they call the modern taste, and in short, desired the three lanes to walk in again, and now is forced to shut them out again by a wall, for there was not a muse could walk there, but she was spied by every country fellow that went by with a pipe in his mouth." When Lord Bolingbroke, after a residence of four years in France, returned on account of the state of his affairs to England, in order to sell his farm at Dawley, he principally resided with Pope at Twickenham, in the society of Marchmont, Wyndham, and other friends. It is probably on this occasion, that Pope composed those beautiful lines "On his Grotto at Twickenham," which have conferred an undying interest on it. Approach, but awful! lo! the Ægerian grot, Where, nobly pensive, St. John sat and thought; Where British sighs from dying Wyndham stole, Who dare to love their country, and be poor. The love of gardens and of gardening appears to be almost exclusively confined to the English, and is partaken of by the poor as well as by the rich. Nothing can be prettier than the gardens attached to the thatched cottages in Devonshire. They are frequently to be seen on the side, and oftener at the bottom of a hill, down which a narrow road leads to a rude single-arched stone bridge. Here a shallow stream may be seen flowing rapidly, and which now and then stickles, to use a Devonshire phrase, over a pavement of either pebbles or ragstone. A little rill descends by the side of the lane, and close to the hedge of the cottage, which is approached by a broad step |