Stowe is now, I believe, in the possession of the Marquis of Chandos, son of the Duke of Buckingham.  It is melancholy to state that the library, the statues, the furniture, and even some of the timber on the estate, were sold in 1848 to satisfy the creditors of the Duke.

Pope was never tired of improving his own grounds.  “I pity you, Sir,” said a friend to him, “because you have now completed every thing belonging to your gardens."[022] “Why,” replied Pope, “I really shall be at a loss for the diversion I used to take in carrying out and finishing things:  I have now nothing left me to do but to add a little ornament or two along the line of the Thames.”  I dare say Pope was by no means so near the end of his improvements as he and his friend imagined.  One little change in a garden is sure to suggest or be followed by another.  Garden-improvements are “never ending, still beginning.”  The late Dr. Arnold, the famous schoolmaster, writing to a friend, says—­“The garden is a constant source of amusement to us both (self and wife); there are always some little alterations to be made, some few spots where an additional shrub or two would be ornamental, something coming into blossom; so that I can always delight to go round and see how things are going on.”  A garden is indeed a scene of continual change.  Nature, even without the aid of the gardener, has “infinite variety,” and supplies “a perpetual feast of nectared sweets where no crude surfeit reigns.”

Spence reports Pope to have said:  “I have sometimes had an idea of planting an old gothic cathedral in trees.  Good large poplars, with their white stems, cleared of boughs to a proper height would serve very well for the columns, and might form the different aisles or peristilliums, by their different distances and heights.  These would look very well near, and the dome rising all in a proper tuft in the middle would look well at a distance.”  This sort of verdant architecture would perhaps have a pleasing effect, but it is rather too much in the artificial style, to be quite consistent with Pope’s own idea of landscape-gardening.  And there are other trees that would form a nobler natural cathedral than the formal poplar.  Cowper did not think of the poplar, when he described a green temple-roof.

    How airy and how light the graceful arch,
    Yet awful as the consecrated roof
    Re-echoing pious anthems.

Almost the only traces of Pope’s garden that now remain are the splendid Spanish chesnut-trees and some elms and cedars planted by the poet himself.  A space once laid out in winding walks and beautiful shrubberies is now a potatoe field!  The present proprietor, Mr. Young, is a wholesale tea-dealer.  Even the bones of the poet, it is said, have been disturbed.  The skull of Pope, according to William Howitt, is now in the private collection of a phrenologist!  The manner in which it was obtained, he says, is this:—­On some occasion of alteration in the church at Twickenham, or burial of some one in the same spot, the coffin of Pope was disinterred, and opened to see the state of the remains.  By a bribe of L50 to the Sexton, possession of the skull was obtained for one night; another skull was then returned instead of the poet’s.