Though Bacon went not quite so freely to nature as our 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