Which not nice art,
    In beds and curious knots, but nature boon
    Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain.

By these curious knots the poet seems to allude, not to figures of “divers colored earth,” but to the artificial and complicated arrangements and divisions of flowers and flower-beds.

Though Bacon went not quite so freely to nature as our latest landscape-gardeners have done, he made the first step in the right direction and deserves therefore the compliment which Mason has paid him in his poem of The English Garden.

                              On thy realm
    Philosophy his sovereign lustre spread;
    Yet did he deign to light with casual glance
    The wilds of Taste, Yes, sagest Verulam,
    ’Twas thine to banish from the royal groves
    Each childish vanity of crisped knot[008]

    And sculptured foliage; to the lawn restore
    Its ample space, and bid it feast the sight
    With verdure pure, unbroken, unabridged;
    For verdure soothes the eye, as roseate sweets
    The smell, or music’s melting strains the ear.

Yes—­“verdure soothes the eye:”—­and the mind too.  Bacon himself observes, that “nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn.”  Mason slightly qualifies his commendation of “the sage” by admitting that he had not quite completed his emancipation from the bad taste of his day.

                Witness his high arched hedge
    In pillored state by carpentry upborn,
    With colored mirrors decked and prisoned birds. 
    But, when our step has paced the proud parterre,
    And reached the heath, then Nature glads our eye
    Sporting in all her lovely carelessness,
    There smiles in varied tufts the velvet rose,
    There flaunts the gadding woodbine, swells the ground
    In gentle hillocks, and around its sides
    Through blossomed shades the secret pathway steals.

The English Garden.

In one of the notes to The English Garden it is stated that “Bacon was the prophet, Milton the herald of modern Gardening; and Addison, Pope, and Kent the champions of true taste.”  Kent was by profession both a Painter and a Landscape-Gardener.  Addison who had a pretty little retreat at Bilton, near Rugby, evinces in most of his occasional allusions to gardens a correct judgment.  He complains that even in his time our British gardeners, instead of humouring nature, loved to deviate from it as much as possible.  The system of verdant sculpture had not gone out of fashion.  Our trees still rose in cones, globes, and pyramids.  The work of the scissors was on every plant and bush.  It was Pope, however, who did most to bring the topiary style into contempt and to encourage a more natural taste, by his humorous paper in the Guardian and his