If Blount despatch'd himself, he play'd the man,
And so may'st thou, illustrious Passeran!


_Nil admirari_ is the motto of the Man of Taste in Building, where he is
naturally at home. He can see no symmetry in the Banqueting House, or in
St. Paul's Covent Garden, or even in St. Paul's itself.

Sure wretched _Wren_ was taught by bungling _Jones_,
To murder mortar, and disfigure stones!

"Substantial" Vanbrugh he likes-=chiefly because his work would make
"such noble ruins." Cost is his sole criterion, and here he, too, seems
to glance obliquely at Canons:--

_Dorick, Ionick,_ shall not there be found,
But it shall cost me threescore thousand pound.

But this was moderate, as the Edgware "folly" reached L250,000. In
Gardening he follows the latest whim for landscape. Here is his
burlesque of the principles of Bridgeman and Batty Langley:--

Does it not merit the beholder's praise,
What's high to sink? and what is low to raise?
Slopes shall ascend where once a green-house stood,
And in my horse-pond I will plant a wood.
Let misers dread the hoarded gold to waste,
Expence and alteration show a _Taste_.

As a connoisseur of Painting this enlightened virtuoso is given over to