[18] “Nor, when cold winter keens the brightening flood,
    Would I, weak shivering, linger on the brink.”
           —­Ibid. 1259-60.

[19] “Life of Thomson.”

[20] “Spring,” 755-58.

[21] “Autumn,” 862-65.

[22] “Epistle of Augustus.”

[23] “Autumn,” 1030-37. Cf. Cowper’s

    “O for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
     Some boundless contiguity of shade!”

[24] “Winter,” 424-32.

[25] “Spring,” 1026-28.

[26] Shakspere’s “broom groves whose shade the dismist bachelor loves;”

Fletcher’s

    “Fountain heads and pathless groves,
    Places which pale passion loves,”

and his

    “Moonlight walks when all the fowls
    Are safely housed, save bats and owls.”

[27] Letter to Howe, September 10.

[28] Letter to Howe, November, 1763.

[29] Alicia Amherst ("History of Gardening in England,” 1896, p. 283) mentions a French and an Italian work, entitled respectively “Plan de Jardins dans le gout Anglais,” Copenhagen, 1798; and “Del Arte dei Giardini Inglesi,” Milan, 1801.  “This passion for the imitation of nature,” says the same authority, “was part of the general reaction which was taking place, not only in gardening but in the world of literature and of fashion.  The extremely artificial French taste had long taken the lead in civilized Europe, and now there was an attempt to shake off the shackles of its exaggerated formalism.  The poets of the age were also pioneers of this school of nature.  Dyer, in his poem of ‘Grongar Hill,’ and Thomson, in his ‘Seasons,’ called up pictures which the gardeners and architects of the day strove to imitate.”  See in this work, for good examples of the formal garden, the plan of Belton House, Lincoln, p. 245; of Brome Hall, Suffolk; of the orangery and canal at Euston, p. 201; and the scroll work patterns of turf and parterres on pp. 217-18.

[30] In Temple’s gardens at Moor Park, Hertfordshire, e.g., there were terraces covered with lead.  Charles II. imported some of Le Notre’s pupils and assistants, who laid out the grounds at Hampton Court in the French taste.  The maze at Hampton Court still existed in Walpole’s time (1770).

[31] It is worth noticing that Batty Langley, the abortive restorer of Gothic, also recommended the natural style of landscape gardening as early as 1728 in his “New Principles of Gardening.”

[32] “History of Gardening in England.”

[33] I. 384-404.

[34] “The Works of William Mason,” in 4 vols., London, 1811.