TOO 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 



