Sporting in all her lovely carelessness,
There smiles in varied tufts the velvet rose,
There flaunts the gadding woodbine, swells the ground
In gentle hillocks, and around its sides
Through blossomed shades the secret pathway steals.

_The English Garden_.

In one of the notes to _The English Garden_ it is stated that "Bacon was
the prophet, Milton the herald of modern Gardening; and Addison, Pope,
and Kent the champions of true taste." Kent was by profession both a
Painter and a Landscape-Gardener. Addison who had a pretty little
retreat at Bilton, near Rugby, evinces in most of his occasional
allusions to gardens a correct judgment. He complains that even in _his_
time our British gardeners, instead of humouring nature, loved to
deviate from it as much as possible. The system of verdant sculpture had
not gone out of fashion. Our trees still rose in cones, globes, and
pyramids. The work of the scissors was on every plant and bush. It was
Pope, however, who did most to bring the topiary style into contempt and
to encourage a more natural taste, by his humorous paper in the
_Guardian_ and his poetical Epistle to the Earl of Burlington. Gray, the
poet, observes in one of his letters, that "our skill in gardening, or
rather laying out grounds, is the only taste we can call our own; the
only proof of original talent in matters of pleasure. This is no small
honor to us;" he continues, "since neither France nor Italy, has ever
had the least notion of it." "Whatever may have been reported, whether
truly or falsely" (says a contributor to _The World_) "of the Chinese
gardens, it is certain that we are the first of the Europeans who have
founded this taste; and we have been so fortunate in the genius of those
who have had the direction of some of the finest spots of ground, that