r latest
landscape-gardeners have done, he made the _first step_ in the right
direction and deserves therefore the compliment which Mason has paid him
in his poem of _The English Garden_.

On thy realm
Philosophy his sovereign lustre spread;
Yet did he deign to light with casual glance
The wilds of Taste, Yes, sagest Verulam,
'Twas thine to banish from the royal groves
Each childish vanity of crisped knot[008]

And sculptured foliage; to the lawn restore
Its ample space, and bid it feast the sight
With verdure pure, unbroken, unabridged;
For verdure soothes the eye, as roseate sweets
The smell, or music's melting strains the ear.

Yes--"_verdure soothes the eye_:"--and the mind too. Bacon himself
observes, that "nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass
kept finely shorn." Mason slightly qualifies his commendation of "the
sage" by admitting that he had not quite completed his emancipation from
the bad taste of his day.

Witness his high arched hedge
In pillored state by carpentry upborn,
With colored mirrors decked and prisoned birds.
But, when our step has paced the proud parterre,
And reached the heath, then Nature glads our eye
Sporting in all her lovely carelessness,
There smiles in varied tufts the velvet rose,
There flaunts the gadding woodbine, swells the ground
In gentle hillocks, and around its sides
Through blossomed shades the secret pathway steals.

_The English Garden_.

In one of the notes to _The English Garden_ it is stated that "Bacon was
the prophet, Milton the herald of modern Gardening; and Addison, Pope,
and Kent the champions of true taste." Kent was by profession both a
Painter and a Landscape-Gardener. Addison who had a pretty little
retreat at Bilton, near Rugby, evinces in most of his occasional
allusions to gardens a correct judgment. He complains that even in _his_
time our British gardeners, instead of humouring nature, loved to
deviate from it as much as possible. The system of verdant sculpture had
not gone out of fashion. Our trees still rose in cones, globes, and
pyramids. The work of the scissors was on every plant and bush. It was
Pope, however, who did most to bring the topiary style into contempt and
to encourage a more natural taste, by his humorous paper in the
_Guardian_ and his poetical Epistle to the Earl of Burlington. Gray, the
poet,