Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.
Still follow sense, of every art the soul;
Parts answering parts shall slide into a whole,
Spontaneous beauties all around advance,
Start e'en from difficulty, strike from chance;
Nature shall join you; time shall make it grow
A work to wonder at-perhaps a STOWE.*
Without it proud Versailles !+ Thy glory falls;
And Nero's terraces desert their walls.

The vast parterres a thousand hands shall make,
Lo! Cobham comes and floats them with a lake;
Or cut wide views through mountains to the plain,
You'll wish your hill or sheltered seat again.

Pope is in most instances singularly happy in his compliments, but the allusion to STOWE-as a work to wonder at”has rather an equivocal appearance, and so also has the

*The seat and gardens of the Lord Viscount Cobham, in Buckinghamshire. Pope concludes the first Epistle of his Moral Essays with a compliment to the patriotism of this nobleman.

And you, brave Cobham! to the latest breath

Shall feel your ruling passion strong in death:

Such in those moments as in all the past

"Oh, save my country, Heaven!" shall be your last.

Two hundred acres and two hundred millions of francs were made over to Le Notre by Louis XIV. to complete these geometrical gardens. One author tells us that in 1816 the ordinary cost of putting a certain portion of the waterworks in play was at the rate of 200 £. per hour, and another still later authority states that when the whole were set in motion once a year on some Royal fête, the cost of the half hour during which the main part of the exhibition lasted was not less than 3,000 £. This is surely a most senseless expenditure. It seems, indeed, almost incredible. I take the statements from Loudon's excellent Encyclopædia of Gardening. The name of one of the original reporters is Neill; the name of the other is not given. The gardens formerly were and perhaps still are full of the vilest specimens of verdant sculpture in every variety of form. Lord Kames gives a ludicrous account of the vomiting stone statues there:-"A lifeless statue of an animal pouring out water may be endured" he observes, "without much disgust: but here the lions and wolves are put in violent action; each has seized its prey, a déer or a lamb, in act to devour; and yet, as by hocuspocus, the whole is converted into a different scene: the lion, forgetting his prey, pours out water plentifully; and the deer, forgetting its danger, performs the same work: a representation no less absurd than that in the opera, where Alexander the Great, after mounting the wall of a town besieged, turns his back to the enemy, and entertains his army with a song."

K

mention of Lord Cobham, the proprietor of the place. In the first draught of the poem, the name of Bridgeman was inserted where Cobham's now stands, but as Bridgeman mistook the compliment for a sneer, the poet thought the landscapegardener had proved himself undeserving of the intended honor, and presented the second-hand compliment to the peer. The grounds at Stowe, more praised by poets than any other private estate in England, extend to 400 acres. There are many other fine estates in our country of far greater extent, but of less celebrity. Some of them are much too extensive, perhaps, for true enjoyment. The Earl of Leicester, when he had completed his seat at Holkham, observed, that "It was a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's country. I look round; not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the Giant of Giant-castle and have ate up all my neighbours." The Earl must have felt that the political economy of Goldsmith in his Deserted Village was not wholly the work of imagination.

Where then, ah! where shall poverty reside,

To scape the pressure of contiguous pride?

Hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton," as Lamb calls him, describes Stowe as a Paradise.

ON LORD COBHAM'S GARDEN.

It puzzles much the sage's brains

Where Eden stood of yore,

Some place it in Arabia's plains,

Some say it is no more.

But Cobham can these tales confute,

As all the curious know;

For he hath proved beyond dispute,
That Paradise is STOWE.

Thomson also calls the place a paradise:

Ye Powers

That o'er the garden and the rural seat

Preside, which shining through the cheerful land
In countless numbers blest Britannia sees;

O, lead me to the wide-extended walks,

The fair majestic paradise of Stowe!

Not Persian Cyrus on Ionia's shore

E'er saw such sylvan scenes; such various art
By genius fired, such ardent genius tamed

By cool judicious art, that in the strife

All-beauteous Nature fears to be out-done.

The poet somewhat mars the effect of this compliment to the charms of Stowe, by making it a matter of regret that the

owner

His verdant files

Of ordered trees should here inglorious range,
Instead of squadrons flaming o'er the field,
And long embattled hosts.

This representation of rural pursuits as inglorious, a sentiment so out of keeping with his subject, is soon after followed rather inconsistently, by a sort of paraphrase of Virgil's celebrated picture of rural felicity, and some of Thomson's own thoughts on the advantages of a retreat from active life.

Oh, knew he but his happiness, of men

The happiest he! Who far from public rage
Deep in the vale, with a choice few retired
Drinks the pure pleasures of the rural life, &c.*

While he, from all the stormy passions free
That restless men involve, hears and but hears,
At distance safe, the human tempest roar,
Wrapt close in conscious peace. The fall of kings,
The rage of nations, and the crush of states,
Move not the man, who from the world escaped,
In still retreats and flowery solitudes,

To nature's voice attends, from month to month,
And day to day, through the revolving year;
Admiring sees her in her every shape;

Feels all her sweet emotions at his heart;

* ERRATUM. In the translation from Virgil at page 27, last line but two,

for sons read sires.

Takes what she liberal gives, nor asks for more.
He, when young Spring, protudes the bursting gems
Marks the first bud, and sucks the healthful gale
Into his freshened soul; her genial hour

He full enjoys, and not a beauty blows

And not an opening blossom breathes in vain.

Thomson in his description of Lord Townshend's seat of Rainham-another English estate once much celebrated and still much admired—exclaims :

Such are thy beauties, Rainham, such the haunts

Of angels, in primeval guiltless days

When man, imparadised, conversed with God.

And Broome after quoting the whole description in his dedication of his own poems to Lord Townshend, observes, in the old fashioned fulsome strain, "This, my lord, is but a faint picture of the place of your retirement which no one ever enjoyed more elegantly."* "A faint picture!" What more would the dedicator have wished Thomson to say? Broome, if not contented with his patron's seat being described as an earthly Paradise, must have desired it to be compared with Heaven itself, and thus have left his Lordship no hope of the enjoyment of a better place than he already possessed.

Samuel Boyse, who when without a shirt to his back sat up in his bed to write verses, with his arms through two holes in his blanket, and when he went into the streets wore paper collars to conceal the sad deficiency of linen, has a poem of considerable length entitled The Triumphs of Nature. It is wholly devoted to a description of this magnificent garden, in which, amongst other architectural ornaments, was a temple dedicated to British worthies, where the busts of Pope and Congreve held conspicuous places. I may as well give a

* Broome though a writer of no great genius (if any), had yet the honor to be associated with Pope in the translation of the Odyssey. He translated the 2nd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 16th, 18th, and 23rd books. Henley (Orator Henley) sneered at Pope, in the following couplet, for receiving so much assistance:

Pope came clean off with Homer, but they say,

Broome went before, and kindly swept the way.

Fenton was another of Pope's auxiliaries. He translated the 1st, 4th, 19th and 20th books (of the Odyssey). Pope himself translated the rest.

specimen of the lines of poor Boyse. Here is his description of that part of Lord Cobham's grounds in which is erected to the Goddess of Love, a Temple containing a statue of the Venus de Medicis.

Next to the fair ascent our steps we traced,
.Where shines afar the bold rotunda placed ;'
The artful dome Ionic columns bear

Light as the fabric swells in ambient air.

Beneath enshrined the Tuscan Venus stands
And beauty's queen the beauteous scene commands:
The fond beholder sees with glad surprize,
Streams glisten, lawns appear, and forests rise-
Here through thick shades alternate buildings break,
There though the borders steals the silver lake;
A soft variety delights the soul,

And harmony resulting crowns the whole.

Congreve in his Letter in verse addressed to Lord Cobham asks him to

Tell how his pleasing Stowe employs his time.

It would seem that the proprietor of Stowe took particular interest in the disposition of the water on his grounds. Congreve enquires

Or dost thou give the winds afar to blow

Each vexing thought, and heart-devouring woe,
And fix thy mind alone on rural scenes,

To turn the level lawns to liquid plains?

To raise the creeping rills from humble beds

And force the latent spring to lift their heads,
On watery columns, capitals to rear,

That mix their flowing curls with upper air?

Lo! Cobham comes and floats them with a lake

And it might be thought that Congreve had taken the hint from the bard of Twickenham if Congreve's poem had not preceded that of Pope. The one was published in 1729, the other in 1731.