[115] Even Jeremy Bentham, the great Utilitarian Philosopher, who pronounced the composition and perusal of poetry a mere amusement of no higher rank than the game of Pushpin, had still something of the common feeling of the poetry of nature in his soul.  He says of himself—­“I was passionately fond of flowers from my youth, and the passion has never left me.” In praise of botany he would sometimes observe, “We cannot propagate stones:”  meaning that the mineralogist cannot circulate his treasures without injuring himself, but the botanist can multiply his specimens at will and add to the pleasures of others without lessening his own.

[116] A man of a polite imagination is let into a great many pleasures that the vulgar are not capable of receiving.  He can converse with a picture and find an agreeable companion in a statue.  He meets with a secret refreshment in a description, and often feels a greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows, than another does in the possession.—­Spectator.

[117] Kent died in 1748 in the 64th year of his age.  As a painter he had no great merit, but many men of genius amongst his contemporaries had the highest opinion of his skill as a Landscape-gardener.  He sometimes, however, carried his love of the purely natural to a fantastic excess, as when in Kensington-garden he planted dead trees to give an air of wild truth to the landscape.

    In Esher’s peaceful grove,
    Where Kent and nature strove for Pelham’s love,

this landscape-gardener is said to have exhibited a very remarkable degree of taste and judgment.  I cannot resist the temptation to quote here Horace Walpole’s eloquent account of Kent:  “At that moment appeared Kent, painter and poet enough to taste the charms of landscape, bold and opinionative enough to dare and to dictate, and born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays.  He leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden[143].  He felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley changing imperceptibly into each other, tasted the beauty of the gentle swell, or concave swoop, and remarked how loose groves crowned an easy eminence with happy ornament, and while they called in the distant view between their graceful stems, removed and extended the perspective by delusive comparison.”—­On Modern Gardening.

[118] When the rage for a wild irregularity in the laying out of gardens was carried to its extreme, the garden paths were so ridiculously tortuous or zig-zag, that, as Brown remarked, a man might put one foot upon zig and the other upon zag.

[119] The natives are much too fond of having tanks within a few feet of their windows, so that the vapours from the water go directly into the house.  These vapours are often seen hanging or rolling over the surface of the tank like thick wreaths of smoke.

[120] Broken brick is called kunkur, but I believe the real kunkur is real gravel, and if I am not mistaken a pretty good sort of gravel, formed of particles of red granite, is obtainable from the Rajmahal hills.