DAWN OF LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 247 



separately.) Divers eminent modern poets in bays, somewhat 

 blighted, to be disposed of a pennyworth. A quickset hog, shot 

 up into a porcupine, by its being forgot a week in rainy weather." 

 In the beginning of the Essay from which the above is taken, 

 Pope quotes Homer's description of the garden of Alcinous, in 

 the Odyssey, and gives his own translation of the passage : 



" Close to the gates a spacious garden lies, 

 From storms defended and inclement skies ; 

 Four acres was the allotted space of ground, 

 Fenc'd with a green inclosure all around. 

 Tall thriving trees confess the fruitful mold, 

 The red'ning apple ripens here to gold. 

 * * * * 



Beds of all various herbs, for ever green, 

 In beauteous order terminate the scene." 



If such was Pope's ideal garden, it had little in common with 

 the landscape style he helped so much to bring in. " How 

 contrary to this simplicity is the modern practice of gardening ! " 

 he continues. " We seem to make it our study to recede from 

 Nature, not only in the various tonsure of greens into the most 

 regular and formal shapes, but even in monstrous attempts 

 beyond the reach of the art itself. We run into sculpture, and 

 are yet better pleased to have our trees in the most awkward 

 figures of men and animals, than in the most regular of their 

 own." No one, even the most ardent advocate of the formal 

 garden, can deny that Pope and Addison had much right on their 

 side. But there was no reason to rush to the other extreme, 

 and have no arrangement, or no straight lines of any sort, in a 

 garden. Two years later Pope settled at Twickenham, and his 

 Villa there, far from being in the simple style he admired, became 

 a complicated piece of mimicry of rural scenery of all sorts. He 

 took infinite pains in planning and planting. " I thank God," he 

 wrote in a letter to a friend, "for every wet day and for every fog, 

 that gives me a headache, but prospers my work." His famous 

 grotto, " composed of marbles, spars, gems, ores, and minerals,"" 

 was the amusement of his declining years. It would hardly lay 

 claim to being "natural," for nothing more fantastical can be 

 imagined, although in Pope's own lines to his grotto, he invites the 

 stranger thus: "Approach! Great Nature studiously behold." 



