238 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



covered him in the other. This was the scripture and theology 

 of the heathens : the natural motion of the sun made them more 

 admire him than its supernatural station did the children of 

 Israel ; the ordinary effects of nature wrought more admiration 

 in them, than in the other all his miracles. Surely the heathens 

 knew better how to join and read these mystical letters, than 

 we Christians, who cast a more careless eye on those common 

 hieroglyphics, and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of 

 Nature.' The Doctor. 



SYDNEY Canon of St PaztPs, first Editor of Edinburgh Review, author of ' Peter 

 SMITH Plymley's Letters, ' Sketches of Moral Philosophy? and countless 'witticisms. 



T WENT for the first time in my life, some years ago, to stay at a 

 very grand and beautiful place in the country, where the 

 grounds are said to be laid out with consummate taste. For the 

 first three or four days I was perfectly enchanted; it seemed 

 something so much better than nature, that I really began to 

 wish the earth had been laid out according to the latest principles 

 of improvement, and that the whole face of nature were a little 

 more the appearance of a park. In three days' time I was tired 

 to death; a thistle, a nettle, a heap of dead bushes, anything 

 that wore the appearance of accident and want of intention, was 

 quite a relief. I used to escape from the made grounds, and 

 walk upon an adjacent goose-common, where the cart-ruts, gravel- 

 pits, bumps, irregularities, coarse un gentlemanlike grass, and all 

 the varieties produced by neglect, were a thousand times more 

 gratifying than the monotony of beauties the result of design, 

 and crowded into narrow confines with a luxuriance and abundance 

 utterly unknown to nature. 



CHARLES AAINE too, whose else? thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun- 

 I 8 baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising 



backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots 

 now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from 



