GARDEN-CRAFT. 



too artificial for the essayist "'Pealing from Jove to 

 Nature's bar," albeit he is privately content to go on 

 touching up his groves and grottoes at Twickenham, 

 securing the services of a peer 



" To form his quincunx, and to rank his vines." 



Gardens are looked upon as so much " copy " to 

 the essayist. What affected tastes have these critics ! 

 What a confession of counterfeit love, of selfish 

 literary interest in gardens is this of Addison's : 

 " I think there are as many kinds of gardening as of 

 poetry. Your makers of parterres and flower-gar- 

 dens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this art ; 

 contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages and cas- 

 cades, are romance writers," How beside nature, 

 beside garden-craft, are such pen-man's whimsies ! 

 " Nothing to the true pleasure of a garden," Bacon 

 would say. 



Walpole's essay on gardening is entertaining 

 reading, and his book gives us glimpses of the 

 country-seats of all the great ladies and gentlemen 

 who had the good fortune to be his acquaintances. 

 His condemnation of the geometrical style of garden- 

 ing common in his day, though quieter in tone than 

 Pope's, was none the less effective in promoting a 

 change of style. He tells how in Kip's views of the 

 seats of our nobility we have the same "tiring and 

 returning uniformity." Every house is approached 

 by two or three gardens, consisting perhaps of a 

 gravel-walk and two grass plats or borders of 

 flowers. "Each rises above the other by two or 



