A garden is a more interesting possession than a gallery of pictures or a cabinet of curiosities.  Its glories are never stationary or stale.  It has infinite variety.  It is not the same to-day as it was yesterday.  It is always changing the character of its charms and always increasing them in number.  It delights all the senses.  Its pleasures are not of an unsocial character; for every visitor, high or low, learned or illiterate, may be fascinated with the fragrance and beauty of a garden.  But shells and minerals and other curiosities are for the man of science and the connoisseur.  And a single inspection of them is generally sufficient:  they never change their aspect.  The Picture-Gallery may charm an instructed eye but the multitude have little relish for human Art, because they rarely understand it:—­while the skill of the Great Limner of Nature is visible in every flower of the garden even to the humblest swain.

It is pleasant to read how the wits and beauties of the time of Queen Anne used to meet together in delightful garden-retreats, ’like the companies in Boccaccio’s Decameron or in one of Watteau’s pictures.’  Ritchings Lodge, for instance, the seat of Lord Bathurst, was visited by most of the celebrities of England, and frequently exhibited bright groups of the polite and accomplished of both sexes; of men distinguished for their heroism or their genius, and of women eminent for their easy and elegant conversation, or for gaiety and grace of manner, or perfect loveliness of face and form—­all in harmonious union with the charms of nature.  The gardens at Ritchings were enriched with Inscriptions from the pens of Congreve and Pope and Gay and Addison and Prior.  When the estate passed into the possession of the Earl of Hertford, his literary lady devoted it to the Muses.  “She invited every summer,” says Dr. Johnson, “some poet into the country to hear her verses and assist her studies.”  Thomson, who praises her so lavishly in his “Spring,” offended her ladyship by allowing her too clearly to perceive that he was resolved not to place himself in the dilemma of which Pope speaks so feelingly with reference to other poetasters.

    Seized and tied down to judge, how wretched I,
    Who can’t be silent, and who will not lie. 
    I sit with sad civility, I read
    With honest anguish and an aching head.

But though “the bard more fat than bard beseems” was restive under her ladyship’s “poetical operations,” and too plainly exhibited a desire to escape the infliction, preferring the Earl’s claret to the lady’s rhymes, she should have been a little more generously forgiving towards one who had already made her immortal.  It is stated, that she never repeated her invitation to the Poet of the Seasons, who though so impatient of the sound of her tongue when it “rolled” her own “raptures,” seems to have been charmed with her at a distance—­while meditating upon her excellencies in the seclusion of his own study.  The compliment to the Countess is rather awkwardly wedged in between descriptions of “gentle Spring” with her “shadowing roses” and “surly Winter” with his “ruffian blasts.”  It should have commenced the poem.