his return from France, down in
his pleasant Essex home, at the seat of Sir Francis Masham. I should
love to give the reader a sample of the way in which the author of "An
Essay concerning Human Understanding" wrote regarding horticultural
matters. But, after some persistent search and inquiry, I have not been
able to see or even to hear of a copy of the book.[C] No one can doubt
but there is wisdom in it. "I believe you think me," he writes in a
private letter to a friend, "too proud to undertake anything wherein I
should acquit myself but unworthily." This is a sort of pride--not very
common in our day--which does _not_ go before a fall.

I name a poet next,--not because a great poet, for he was not, nor yet
because he wrote "The English Garden,"[D] for there is sweeter
garden-perfume in many another poem of the day that does not pique our
curiosity by its title. But the Reverend William Mason, if not among the
foremost of poets, was a man of most kindly and liberal sympathies. He
was a devoted Whig, at a time when Whiggism meant friendship for the
American Colonists; and the open expression of this friendship cost him
his place as a Royal Chaplain. I will remember this longer than I
remember his "English Garden,"--longer than I remember his best couplet
of verse:--

"While through the west, where sinks the crimson day,
Meek twilight slowly sails, and waves her banners gray."

It was alleged, indeed, by those who loved to say ill-natured things,
(Horace Walpole among them,) that in the later years of his life he
forgot his first love of Liberalism and became politically conservative.
But it must be remembered that the good poet lived into the time when
the glut and gore of the French Revolution made people hold their
breath, and when every man who lifted a humane plaint against the
incessant creak and crash of the guillotine was reckoned by all mad
reformers a conservative. I think, if I had lived in that day, I should
have been a conservative, too,--however much the pretty and bloody
Desmoulins might have made faces at me in the newspapers.

I can find nothing in Mason's didactic poem to quote. There are tasteful
suggestions scattered through it,--better every way than his poetry. The
grounds of his vicarage at Aston must have offered charming
loitering-places. I will leave him idling there,--perhaps conning over
some letter of his friend the poet Gray; perhaps lounging in the very
alcove where he had in