English pleasure-gardens have been much imitated by the French.  Viscomte Girardin, at his estate of Ermenonville, dedicated an inscription in amusing French-English to the proprietor of the Leasowes—­

    THIS PLAIN STONE
    TO WILLIAM SHENSTONE;
    IN HIS WRITINGS HE DISPLAYED
    A MIND NATURAL;
    AT LEASOWES HE LAID
    ARCADIAN GREENS RURAL.

The Viscomte, though his English composition was so quaint and imperfect, was an elegant writer in his own language, and showed great taste and skill in laying out his grounds.  He had visited England, and carefully studied our modern style of gardening.  He had personally consulted Shenstone, Mason, Whateley and other English authors on subjects of rural taste.  He published an eloquent description of his own estate.  His famous friend Rousseau wrote the preface to it.  The book was translated into English.  Rousseau spent his last days at Ermenonville and was buried there in what is called The Isle of Poplars.  The garden is now in a neglected state, but the tomb of Rousseau remains uninjured, and is frequently visited by the admirers of his genius.

“Dr. Warton,” says Bowles, “mentions Milton and Pope as the poets to whom English Landscape is indebted, but he forgot poor Shenstone.”  A later writer, however, whose sympathy for genius communicates such a charm to all his anecdotes and comments in illustration of the literary character, has devoted a chapter of his Curiosities of Literature to a notice of the rural tastes of the proprietor of the Leasowes.  I must give a brief extract from it.

“When we consider that Shenstone, in developing his fine pastoral ideas in the Leasowes, educated the nation into that taste for landscape-gardening, which has become the model of all Europe, this itself constitutes a claim on the gratitude of posterity.  Thus the private pleasures of a man of genius may become at length those of a whole people.  The creator of this new taste appears to have received far less notice than he merited.  The name of Shenstone does not appear in the Essay on Gardening, by Lord Orford; even the supercilious Gray only bestowed a ludicrous image on these pastoral scenes, which, however, his friend Mason has celebrated; and the genius of Johnson, incapacitated by nature to touch on objects of rural fancy, after describing some of the offices of the landscape designer, adds, that ’he will not inquire whether they demand any great powers of mind.’  Johnson, however, conveys to us his own feelings, when he immediately expresses them under the character of ‘a sullen and surly speculator.’  The anxious life of Shenstone would indeed have been remunerated, could he have read the enchanting eulogium of Whateley on the Leasowes; which, said he, ’is a perfect picture of his mind—­simple, elegant and amiable; and will always suggest a doubt whether the spot inspired his verse, or whether in the scenes which he formed, he only realised the pastoral images