ffair, as is evident from the mishaps which
befell those well-known contemporaneous travellers of Fielding, Joseph
Andrews and Parson Adams. Traces of the work of Mr. London are to be
seen even now in the older parts of the grounds of Blenheim and of
Castle Howard in Yorkshire.

Stephen Switzer was an accomplished gardener, well known by a great many
horticultural and agricultural works, which in his day were "on sale at
his seed-shop in Westminster Hall." Chiefest among these was the
"Ichnographia Rustica," which gave general directions for the
management of country-estates, while it indulged in some prefatory
magniloquence upon the dignity and antiquity of the art of gardening. It
is the first of all arts, he claims; for "tho' Chirurgery may plead
high, inasmuch as in the second chapter of Genesis that _operation_ is
recorded of taking the rib from Adam, wherewith woman was made, yet the
very current of the Scriptures determines in favor of Gardening." It
surprises us to find that so radical an investigator should entertain
the belief, as he clearly did, that certain plants were produced without
seed by the vegetative power of the sun acting upon the earth. He is
particularly severe upon those Scotch gardeners, "Northern lads," who,
with "a little learning and a great deal of impudence, know, or pretend
to know, more in one twelvemonth than a laborious, honest South-country
man does in seven years."

His agricultural observations are of no special value, nor do they
indicate any advance from the practice of Worlidge. He deprecates paring
and burning as exhaustive of the vegetable juices, advises winter
fallowing and marling, and affirms that "there is no superficies of
earth, how poor soever it may be, but has in its own bowels something or
other for its own improvement."

In gardening, he expresses great contempt for the clipped trees and
other excesses of the Dutch school, yet advises the construction of
terraces, lays out his ponds by geometric formulae, and is so far devoted
to out-of-door sculpture as to urge the establishment of a royal
institution for the instruction of ingenious young men, who, on being
taken into the service of noblemen and gentlemen, would straightway
people their grounds with statues. And this notwithstanding Addison had
published his famous papers on the "Pleasures of the Imagination" three
years before.[5]

Richard Bradley was the Dr. Lardner of his day,--a man of general
scientific