ty, and dart its cherishing beams on these dull and gloomy scenes
of melancholy and misery, and yet that so few of us rightly consider its
power, or are thankful to Divine Omnipotence for it. The great Roscommon
(not greater than good) speaks of it with divine transport, and exhorts
mankind to admire it, from the benefits and celestial beams it displays
on the world:--

Great eye of all, whose glorious ray
Rules the bright empire of the day;
O praise his name, without whose purer light
Thou hadst been hid in an abyss of night."[40]

Switzer (as appears from the Preface to his Iconologia) was so struck
with the business and pleasures of a country life, that he collected, or
meant to collect, whatever he could respecting this subject, scattered
up and down as they were in loose irregular papers and books; but this
work, we regret to say, never made its appearance. That he would have
done this well, may be guessed at from so many of his pages recording
what he calls "the eternal duration" of Virgil's works, or those of "the
noble and majestic" Milton:--

Flowers worthy of Paradise, which no nice art
In beds, and curious knots, but nature boon
Pour'd forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain.

Though prim regularity, and "parterres embroidered like a petticoat,"
were in his time in high vogue, yet his pages shew his enlarged views on
this subject, and the magnificent ideas he had formed, by surrounding
them by rural enclosures, (probably by reading Mr. Addison), perfumed
with blossoms, and bespangled with the rich tufts of nature. Nothing, he
says, is now so much wanted to complete the grandeur of the British
nation, as noble and magnificent gardens, statues, and water-works; long
extended shady walks, and groves, and the adjacent country laid open to
view, and not bounded by high walls. The pleasant fields, and paddocks,
in all the beautiful attire of nature, would then appear to be a part of
it, and look as if the adjacent country were all a garden. Walls take
away the rural aspect of any seat; wood, water, and such like, being the
noble and magnificent decorations of a country villa. Switzer calls
water the spirit and most enchanting beauty of nature. He is so struck
with "the beautifulness and nobleness of terrace walks," and
particularly with that truly magnificent and noble one, belonging to the
Right Honourable the Earl of Nottingham, at _Burleigh-on-the-Hill_, that
"for my own part I must