ian.')

"'Pope has given not only some of our _first_ but _best_ rules and
observations on _Architecture_ and _Gardening_.' (See Warton's Essay,
vol. ii. p. 237, &c.&c.)

"Now, is it not a shame, after this, to hear our Lakers in 'Kendal
green,' and our Bucolical Cockneys, crying out (the latter in a
wilderness of bricks and mortar) about 'Nature,' and Pope's 'artificial
in-door habits?' Pope had seen all of nature that _England_ alone can
supply. He was bred in Windsor Forest, and amidst the beautiful scenery
of Eton; he lived familiarly and frequently at the country seats of
Bathurst, Cobham, Burlington, Peterborough, Digby, and Bolingbroke;
amongst whose seats was to be numbered _Stowe_. He made his own little
five acres' a model to Princes, and to the first of our artists who
imitated nature. Warton thinks 'that the most engaging of _Kent's_ works
was also planned on the model of Pope's,--at least in the opening and
retiring shades of Venus's Vale.'

"It is true that Pope was infirm and deformed; but he could walk, and he
could ride (he rode to Oxford from London at a stretch), and he was
famous for an exquisite eye. On a tree at Lord Bathurst's is carved,
'Here Pope sang,'--he composed beneath it. Bolingbroke, in one of his
letters, represents them both writing in a hayfield. No poet ever
admired Nature more, or used her better, than Pope has done, as I will
undertake to prove from his works, prose and verse, if not anticipated
in so easy and agreeable a labour. I remember a passage in Walpole,
somewhere, of a gentleman who wished to give directions about some
willows to a man who had long served Pope in his grounds: 'I understand,
sir,' he replied: 'you would have them hang down, sir, _somewhat
poetical_.' Now if nothing existed but this little anecdote, it would
suffice to prove Pope's taste for _Nature_, and the impression which he
had made on a common-minded man. But I have already quoted Warton and
Walpole (_both_ his enemies), and, were it necessary, I could amply
quote Pope himself for such tributes to _Nature_ as no poet of the
present day has even approached.

"His various excellence is really wonderful: architecture, painting,
_gardening_, all are alike subject to his genius. Be it remembered, that
English _gardening_ is the purposed perfectioning of niggard _Nature_,
and that without it England is but a hedge-and-ditch,
double-post-and-rail, Hounslow-heath and Clapham-common sort of a
country, since