There is also at Hagley a complimentary inscription on an urn to Alexander Pope; and, on an octagonal building called Thomson’s Seat, there is an inscription to the author of The Seasons.  Hagley is kept up with great care and is still in possession of the descendants of the founder.  But a late visitor (Mr. George Dodd) expresses a doubt whether the Leasowes, even in its comparative decay, is not a finer bit of landscape, a more delightful place to lose one-self in, than even its larger and better preserved neighbour.

[024] Coleridge is reported to have said—­“There is in Crabbe an absolute defect of high imagination; he gives me little pleasure.  Yet no doubt he has much power of a certain kind, and it is good to cultivate, even at some pains, a catholic taste in literature.”  Walter Savage Landor, in his “Imaginary Conversations,” makes Porson say—­“Crabbe wrote with a two-penny nail and scratched rough truths and rogues’ facts on mud walls.”  Horace Smith represents Crabbe, as “Pope in worsted stockings.”  That there is merit of some sort or other, and that of no ordinary kind, in Crabbe’s poems, is what no one will deny.  They relieved the languor of the last days of two great men, of very different characters—­Sir Walter Scott and Charles James Fox.

[025] The poet had a cottage and garden in Kew-foot-Lane at or near Richmond.  In the alcove in the garden is a small table made of the wood of the walnut tree.  There is a drawer to the table which in all probability often received charge of the poet’s effusions hot from the brain.  On a brass tablet inserted in the top of the table is this inscription—­“This table was the property of James Thomson, and always stood in this seat.”

[026] Shene or Sheen:  the old name of Richmond, signifying in Saxon shining or splendour.

[027] Highgate and Hamstead.

[028] In his last sickness

[029] On looking back at page 36 I find that I have said in the foot note that it is only within the present century that gardening has been elevated into a fine art.  I did not mean within the 55 years of this 19th century, but within a hundred years.  Even this, however, was an inadvertency.  We may go a little further back.  Kent and Pope lived to see Landscape-Gardening considered a fine art.  Before their time there were many good practical gardeners, but the poetry of the art was not then much regarded except by a very few individuals of more than ordinary refinement.

[030] Catherine the Second grossly disgraced herself as a woman—­partly driven into misconduct herself by the behaviour of her husband—­but as a sovereign it cannot be denied that she exhibited a penetrating sagacity and great munificence; and perhaps the lovers of literature and science should treat her memory with a little consideration.  When Diderot was in distress and advertized his library for sale, the Empress sent him an order on a banker