which abound in his songs.’  Yes!  Shenstone had been delighted could he have heard that Montesquieu, on his return home, adorned his ’Chateau Gothique, mais orne de bois charmans, don’t j’ai pris l’idee en Angleterre;’ and Shenstone, even with his modest and timid nature, had been proud to have witnessed a noble foreigner, amidst memorials dedicated to Theocritus and Virgil, to Thomson and Gesner, raising in his grounds an inscription, in bad English, but in pure taste, to Shenstone himself; for having displayed in his writings ’a mind natural,’ and in his Leasowes ‘laid Arcadian greens rural;’ and recently Pindemonte has traced the taste of English gardening to Shenstone.  A man of genius sometimes receives from foreigners, who are placed out of the prejudices of his compatriots, the tribute of posterity!”

“The Leasowes,” says William Howitt, “now belongs to the Atwood family; and a Miss Atwood resides there occasionally.  But the whole place bears the impress of desertion and neglect.  The house has a dull look; the same heavy spirit broods over the lawns and glades:  And it is only when you survey it from a distance, as when approaching Hales-Owen from Hagley, that the whole presents an aspect of unusual beauty.”

Shenstone was at least as proud of his estate of the Leasowes as was Pope of his Twickenham Villa—­perhaps more so.  By mere men of the world, this pride in a garden may be regarded as a weakness, but if it be a weakness it is at least an innocent and inoffensive one, and it has been associated with the noblest intellectual endowments.  Pitt and Fox and Burke and Warren Hastings were not weak men, and yet were they all extremely proud of their gardens.  Every one, indeed, who takes an active interest in the culture and embellishment of his garden, finds his pride in it and his love for it increase daily.  He is delighted to see it flourish and improve beneath his care.  Even the humble mechanic, in his fondness for a garden, often indicates a feeling for the beautiful, and a genial nature.  If a rich man were openly to boast of his plate or his equipages, or a literary man of his essays or his sonnets, as lovers of flowers boast of their geraniums or dahlias or rhododendrons, they would disgust the most indulgent hearer.  But no one is shocked at the exultation of a gardener, amateur or professional, when in the fulness of his heart he descants upon the unrivalled beauty of his favorite flowers: 

    ‘Plants of his hand, and children of his care.’

“I have made myself two gardens,” says Petrarch, “and I do not imagine that they are to be equalled in all the world.  I should feel myself inclined to be angry with fortune if there were any so beautiful out of Italy.”  “I wish,” says poor Kirke White writing to a friend, “I wish you to have a taste of these (rural) pleasures with me, and if ever I should live to be blessed with a quiet parsonage, and another great object of my ambition—­a garden, I have no doubt but we shall be for some short intervals at least two quite contented bodies.”  The poet Young, in the latter part of his life, after years of vain hopes and worldly struggles, gave himself up almost entirely to the sweet seclusion of a garden; and that peace and repose which cannot be found in courts and political cabinets, he found at last