some interest
even in the Alps, wrote stanzas to the 'Grande Chartreuse,' admired
Salvator Rosa, and even visited Chamonix. Another characteristic change
is more to the present purpose. A conspicuous mark of the time was a
growing taste for gardening. The taste has, I suppose, existed ever
since our ancestors were turned out of the Garden of Eden. Milton's
description of that place of residence, and Bacon's famous essay, and
Cowley's poems addressed to the great authority Evelyn, and most of all
perhaps Maxwell's inimitable description of the very essence of garden,
may remind us that it flourished in the seventeenth century. It is
needless to say in Oxford how beautiful an old-fashioned garden might
be. But at this time a change was taking place in the canons of taste.
Temple in a well-known essay had praised the old-fashioned garden and
had remarked how the regularity of English plantations seemed ridiculous
to--of all people in the world--the Chinese. By the middle of the
eighteenth century there had been what is called a 'reaction,' and the
English garden, which was called 'natural,' was famous and often
imitated in France. It is curious to remark how closely this taste was
associated with the group of friends whom Pope has celebrated. The
first, for example, of the four 'Moral Epistles,' is addressed to
Cobham, who laid out the famous garden at Stowe, in which 'Capability
Brown,' the most popular landscape gardener of the century, was brought
up; the third is addressed to Bathurst, an enthusiastic gardener, who
had shown his skill at his seat of Richings near Colnbrook; and the
fourth to Burlington, whose house and gardens at Chiswick were laid out
by Kent, the famous landscape gardener and architect--Brown's
predecessor. In the same epistle Pope ridicules the formality of
Chandos' grounds at Canons. A description of his own garden includes the
familiar lines

'Here St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul,
And he (Peterborough) whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines
Now forms my quincunx and now ranks my vines,
Or tames the genius of the stubborn plain
Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain.'

Pope's own garden was itself a model. 'Pope,' says Horace Walpole, 'had
twisted and twirled and rhymed and harmonised his little five acres
till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening
beyond one another, and the whole su