highest degree;" and to the lately deceased Sir U.
Price, who must also have passed through France, to view (with the
eagerness with which he did view) the rich and magnificently decorated
gardens of Italy, "aided with the splendour and magnificence of art,"
their ballustrades, their fountains, basons, vases and statues, and
which he dwells on in his Essays with the same enthusiasm as when he
there contemplated the works of Titian, Paul Veronese, and other great
masters. Indeed, those pages where he regrets the demolition of many of
our old English gardens, and when he dwells on the probability that even
Raphael, Giulio Romano, and M. Angelo, (which last planted the famous
cypresses in the garden of the Villa d'Este) were consulted on the
decorations of some of the old Italian ones; these pages at once shew
the fascinating charms of his classic pen.[13]

England can boast too of very great names, who have been attached to
this art, and most zealously patronized it, though they have not written
on the subject:--Lord Burleigh, Lord Hudson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord
Capell, who honoured himself by several years correspondence with La
Quintinye; William the Third,--for Switzer tells us, that "in the least
interval of ease, gardening took up a greater part of his time, in which
he was not only a delighter, but likewise a great judge,"--the Earl of
Essex, whom the mild and benevolent Lord William Russell said "was the
worthiest, the justest, the sincerest, and the most concerned for the
public, of any man he ever knew;" Lord William Russell himself, too, on
whom Thomson says,

_Bring every sweetest flower, and let me strew
The grave where Russell lies_,

whose fall Switzer feelingly laments, as one of the best of masters, and
encouragers of arts and sciences, particularly gardening, that that age
produced, and who "made _Stratton_, about seven miles from Winchester,
his seat, and his gardens there some of the best that were made in those
early days, such indeed as have mocked some that have been done since;
and the gardens of Southampton House, in Bloomsbury Square, were also of
his making;" the generous friend of this Lord William Russell, the manly
and patriotic Duke of Devonshire, who erected _Chatsworth_, that noble
specimen of a magnificent spirit;[14] Henry Earl of Danby, the Duke of
Argyle, beheaded in 1685, for having supported the rebellion of
Monmouth; the Earl of Halifax, the friend of Addison, Swift, Pope,