rk.

Hardly two miles from Farnham, and reached by a road overarched by fine
oaks, Moor Park stands on the banks of the Wey. A turn in the lane
throws open a view of rich hayfields and pasture, with the river winding
in and out under a ridge of oakwoods; much the same view, perhaps, as
Swift first had of the fields and the Wey when he came to Moor Park from
Ireland to copy out Sir William Temple's essays and to meet the
dark-eyed waiting-maid who was to inspire one of the great passions of
literary history.

Moor Park was Sir William Temple's new name for an old manor. The name
under which he bought the house and land was Compton Hall, and he
renamed it after a property in Hertfordshire. "The perfectest figure of
a garden I ever saw, either at home or abroad, was that of Moor Park in
Hertfordshire, when I knew it about thirty years ago," he wrote in his
_Essay on the Gardens of Epicures_: and he laid out his own garden in
the Dutch style which he admired. The garden has changed with the
changing tastes of later owners; the house has fared a little better,
though it was once metamorphosed into a Hydropathic Sanatorium--a new
and dismal Tale of a Tub.

[Illustration: _Moor Park._]

Moor Park, when Sir William Temple had it, saw the writing of many
books. Sir William Temple himself, deeply hurt with his sovereign, James
II, for striking his name off the Privy Council, had vowed to give up
diplomacy and turn to gardening and writing for the rest of his life.
His gardening may have been as good as his writing, and his essay on
Gardening is, of all his writings, perhaps the best. But it was in his
seclusion at Moor Park that he wrote, also, one of the most ridiculous
papers that ever brought the fame of an essayist to a retired
politician. His _Essay Upon the Ancient and Modern Learning_ remains one
of the most astonishing examples of the admirable writing down of trash
in the history of letters. Quite unnecessarily, he had taken up the task
of comparing modern writers with ancient, to the disadvantage of the
modern, and he cannot be said to have been well equipped for the
business. He had never read a word of Greek, and he achieved the
distinction of criticising modern writing without a single reference to
the works of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, Moliere, Racine,
Corneille, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare. The extraordinary
thing is that the book was welcomed, and when a quarrel was struck over
his clai