112 



There hear his candour own, in fashion's spite, 

 In spite of courtly dulness hear it own, 

 There is a grace in wild variety 

 Surpassing rule and order. Temple, yes, 

 There is a grace; and let eternal wreaths 

 Adorn their brows who fixt its empire here." 



He then, in glowing lines, pays an animated tribute to 

 Addison, Pope, and Kent. Hume records that " he was 

 full of honour and humanity." Sir William thus concludes 

 one of his philosophic essays: — "When this is done, human 

 life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, 

 that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it 

 quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." His 

 garden was one of his last delights. He knew what kind of 

 life was best fitted to make a man's last days happy. Mr. 

 Walpole, though he censures Sir William's warm panegyric 

 on the garden at Moor Park, yet scruples not doing him full 

 justice, in styling him an excellent man, and an admired 

 writer, whose style, as to his garden, is animated with the 

 colouring and glow of poetry. Mr. Cobbett, in his English 

 Gardener, thus deplores the fate of Moor Park: — " This 

 really wise and excellent man, Sir W. Temple, who, while 

 he possessed the soundest judgment, and was employed in 

 some of the greatest concerns of his country, so ardently, 

 yet so rationally and unaffectedly, praises the pursuits of 

 gardening, in which he delighted from his youth to his old 

 age ; and of his taste in which, he gave such delightful proofs 

 in those gardens and grounds at Moor Park, beneath the 

 turf of one spot of which, he caused by his will, his heart to 

 be buried, and which spot, together with all the rest of the 

 beautiful arrangement, has been torn about and disfigured 

 within the last fifty years, by a succession of wine merchants, 

 spirit merchants, West Indians, and God knows what be- 

 sides." And, in his Woodlands, he says, "I have stood for 

 hours, when a little boy, looking at this object (the canal and 



