lime in any natural form. Questionless (to use the favoured word of Sir Thomas Browne), such scenes were not native to Strawberry Hill any more than to dusty Arlington Street; questionless, he sought them not by travel; nor did the fortunes of life lead him their way. If, while journeying in Italy in youth, he saw any views of entrancing beauty, any revelation of the broad forces of Nature, we hear not of them from his gossipping quill.

In truth he was no out-doorling"; his regard of Nature was a near-sighted one, ever close to a house; such as a treillage, an arbour, a window-planting, and above all a garden.

"It was not peculiar to Walpole to think in that manner” -(to borrow his closing fling at Sir William Temple). The conscious love of Nature, the taste for landscape, either grand or serenely beautiful, was stagnant among English folk till Walpole's day. Whatever sympathy there was for Nature was wholly for its home side; its universal expression was in the formal English garden. It proves how little Walpole comprehended the truth-and the beauty of truth-in landscape, when he could say and believe that the new garden-craft which he championed was "the art of creating landscape." There are wide differences in enthusiasms. Thoreau thought the love of a cultivated garden belittling to a man's soul, and be talked of the vastness, the expansion of a life spent with wild Nature. But Thoreau found his wild Nature on the banks of Walden Pond. His haunts were little changed since his day when first I saw them; and no sunny orchard, no

lilac-bower ever seemed to me more tame than the smooth bank

of Walden Pond. But it satisfied Thoreau's longings; nor will we doubt bis appreciation of Nature, because he trod not with John Muir the glorious hanging meadows, the vast sombre forests of the mountains of California; because much of his wild sojourn was spent in a bean-field. Nor do we doubt Walpole's love of Nature though garden-flowers were his whole botany, nightingales his entire feathered world, and squirrels his wild animal life. He loved what he saw and understood. He gloried in his great eagle carved nobly in stone, and his heart swelled at a beautiful landscape woven in tapestry.

Walpole was much influenced by simple natural conditions, such as the perfume of flowers; he was sensitive to their fragrance and nice in distinctions, as true flower-lovers ever He surrounded himself with flowers of delicate scent; in truth no other than those are named as growing in the garden at Strawberry Hill.

are.

On June 10, 1765, he writes at Strawberry Hill, at "Eleven at night":

I am just come out of the garden in the most oriental of all evenings, and from breathing odours beyond those of Araby. The acacias which the Arabians have the sense to worship are covered with blossoms, the honeysuckles dangle from every tree in festoons, the seringas

are thickets of sweets, and the new cut hay
in the field tempers the balmy gales with simple
freshness.

This sentence reveals to us, what is ever of interest to all flower-lovers, namely: the garden-loves of a fellow-enthusiast. Acacia, lilac, bhoneysuckle, apple-blossoms, seringa, laburnum, these were his favourites, and were in this very order in frequency and warmth of mention.

It pleases me to fancy that Walpole's favourite plants and trees were truly typical of his life. They were not 'exotics, not rare and costly blossoms rich of hue or grotesque of form, such as might be expected from the indoor gatherings of Strawberry Hill. Neither were they native wild flowers; for him such did not exist; not even the violet blooms in his pages. They were the homely shrubs and vines of hundreds of English gardens; not native plants but the "botanical bravery" of the Persians (the words of Sir Thomas Browne). So long and so happily naturalized are they that now they seem truly English. Walpole's favourites were domestic flowers; the lilac especially has ever been a home-body, crowding close to a door-yard. They speak to me of that love of his own home, which above all his gossip, all his frivolity, all his regard for fine company, was ever dominant, ever glowing in Walpole's heart.

His chosen flowers were also emblematic of his character. The smooth, waxen syringa was formal-almost artificial in its contour, and equally so in its "mastering odour"; yet it was persistent in its growth, and had a sturdy bold on life.

The lilac of that day was the graceful, but somewhat spindling Persian lilac-Walpole's very figure; and the pale reserved tint of its pensile clusters was the favoured hue for his refined silk and silver attire. Above all the precise elegance, the aristocratic delicacy of the acacia, its slender yet vivacious habit of growth, its sensitiveness to the attacks of the rude, its brittle fragility, all render it a striking emblem of Walpole's person and character. He wrote:

The acacia is the genteelest of all trees; but you must take care to plant them in a first row, and where they will be well sheltered; for the least wind tears and breaks them in pieces.

In this Essay he speaks the acacia's praises.

With the persistent and tender affection of his clinging to bis old-lady-loves, Walpole greeted each year his old flowerfriends; no fair young maids-of-honour, no new and brilliant blossoms ever captured him as a lover; his yearly letters of welcome to his "greenth and lilac-bood and seringa-hood," to the flowers known in past years, breathe in half-sad jest the very spirit of the lovely verses beginning:

God does not send us strange flowers every year;
When the spring winds blow o'er the pleasant places
The same dear things lift up the same dear faces.

Knowing this indifference to Nature-nay, this ignorance, it is a surprise to find Walpole writing in eloquent advocacy of

the "natural school" in gardencraft. I may say in explanation that it was not so very natural after all; it was only an imitation of nature. The natural garden of Walpole's Essay was not nearly as sincere and unaffected as the old formal garden, which in its purest form was very reasonable and genuine.

Many of Walpole's critics-I need not name them-have declared his style stilted and artificial. Men of parts, however, recognize that while his subjects are often affected and constrained his manner of writing of them is natural and often simple. Hazlitt deems this Essay on Modern Gardening "disagreeably affected and artificial in style”—a shallow criticism. The style is formal, but it is suited to the subject. Montaigne uses an odd expression; be says: "I would naturalize Art rather than artilize Nature." A garden artilizes Nature, and Walpole writes with the precision suited to this artilization.

The personal element enters into this Essay as distinctly if not as constantly as in his letters. We do not proceed far without being distinctly aware that the author was a member of society and a gentleman of fortune. We have but a few words of the Garden of Eden, the Homeric legend of Alcinous and the mural records of Herculaneum ere we hear of rich friends and important relatives and their splendid country seats.

It is a prosaic judgment which accords fame according to the number of times an author is quoted or cited; yet such arithmetical criticism is not false, though merit is reckoned by other methods. This Essay upon Gardening and the Essay on Gardens