And Mr. Bowles persists that he is a well-wisher to Pope!!!  He has, then, edited an “assassin” and a “coward” wittingly, as well as lovingly.  In my former letter I have remarked upon the editor’s forgetfulness of Pope’s benevolence.  But where he mentions his faults it is “with sorrow”—­his tears drop, but they do not blot them out.  The “recording angel” differs from the recording clergyman.  A fulsome editor is pardonable though tiresome, like a panegyrical son whose pious sincerity would demi-deify his father.  But a detracting editor is a paricide.  He sins against the nature of his office, and connection—­he murders the life to come of his victim.  If his author is not worthy to be mentioned, do not edit at all:  if he be, edit honestly, and even flatteringly.  The reader will forgive the weakness in favour of mortality, and correct your adulation with a smile.  But to sit down “mingere in patrios cineres,” as Mr. Bowles has done, merits a reprobation so strong, that I am as incapable of expressing as of ceasing to feel it.

Further Addenda.

It is worthy of remark that, after all this outcry about “in-door nature” and “artificial images,” Pope was the principal inventor of that boast of the English, Modern Gardening.  He divides this honour with Milton.  Hear Warton:—­“It hence appears, that this enchanting art of modern gardening, in which this kingdom claims a preference over every nation in Europe, chiefly owes its origin and its improvements to two great poets, Milton and Pope.”

Walpole (no friend to Pope) asserts that Pope formed Kent’s taste, and that Kent was the artist to whom the English are chiefly indebted for diffusing “a taste in laying out grounds.”  The design of the Prince of Wales’s garden was copied from Pope’s at Twickenham.  Warton applauds “his singular effort of art and taste, in impressing so much variety and scenery on a spot of five acres.”  Pope was the first who ridiculed the “formal, French, Dutch, false and unnatural taste in gardening,” both in prose and verse. (See, for the former, “The Guardian.”)

“Pope has given not only some of our first but best rules and observations on Architecture and Gardening.” (See Warton’s Essay, vol. ii. p. 237, &c. &c.)

Now, is it not a shame, after this, to hear our Lakers in “Kendal Green,” and our Bucolical Cockneys, crying out (the latter in a wilderness of bricks and mortar) about “Nature,” and Pope’s “artificial in-door habits?” Pope had seen all of nature that England alone can supply.  He was bred in Windsor Forest, and amidst the beautiful scenery of Eton; he lived familiarly and frequently at the country seats of Bathurst, Cobham, Burlington, Peterborough, Digby, and Bolingbroke; amongst whose seats was to be numbered Stowe.  He made his own little “five acres” a model to princes, and to the first of our artists who imitated nature.  Warton thinks “that the most engaging of Kent’s works was also planned on the model of Pope’s,—­at least in the opening and retiring shades of Venus’s Vale.”