and
Steele, and on whom a funeral poem thus speaks,

_In the rich furniture of whose fair mind,
Those dazzling intellectual graces shin'd,
That drew the love and homage of mankind._[15]

Lord Weymouth; Dr. Sherard of Eltham; Collinson, "to whose name is
attached all that respect which is due to benevolence and virtue;"
Grindal, Bishop of London, who cultivated with great success the vine
and other productions of his garden at Fulham; Compton, Bishop of
London, eminent, as Mr. Falconer in his Fulham observes, for his
unbounded charity and beneficence, and who was so struck with the
genius, the learning, and probity of Mr. Ray, that he was almost at the
entire charge of erecting the monument to him; the Earl of Scarborough,
an accomplished nobleman, immortalized by the enchanting pen of Pope,
and the fine pen of Chesterfield; the Earl of Gainsborough; the great
Chatham, whose taste in the embellishment of rural nature has been
exultingly acknowledged by Mr. Walpole, and by George Mason;[16] with
numerous other men of rank and science.[17] These have highly assisted
in elevating gardening to the rank it has long since held, and has
allured multitudes to this delightful science:--no wonder, when _Homer_
=writeth how= _Laertes_ =the olde man, was wont with his travaile in his
Orchards, to drive from his minde the sorrow hee tooke for the absence
of his sonne=. When old Gerarde asks his _courteous and well-willing
readers_--"whither do all men walk for their honest recreation, but
where the earth hath most beneficially painted her face with flourishing
colours? and what season of the year more longed for than the spring,
whose gentle breath enticeth forth the kindly sweets, and makes them
yield their fragrant smells?" When the Lord Chancellor Bacon declares a
garden "is the purest of human pleasures; it is the greatest refreshment
to the spirits of man:" and when this wonderfully gifted man thus fondly
dwells on part of its allurements;--"the breath of flowers is far
sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes like the warbling of music),
than in the hand; therefore, nothing is more fit for that delight, than
to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air; the
flower, which above all others yields the sweetest smell in the air, is
the violet;[18] next to that is the musk rose, then the
strawberry-leaves, dying with a most-excellent cordial smell; then sweet
briar, then wall-flowers, which are v