to his friends. Writing to Dean Swift he says, "The gardens ex-' tend and flourish as knowing nothing of the guests they have lost.. I have more fruit-trees and kitchen-garden than you have any thought of; nay I have good melons and pine-apples of my own growth. I am as much a better gardener as I am a worse poet than when you saw me; but gardening is near akin to philosophy, for Tully says, Agricultura proxima sapientia." And again, in a letter to Mr. Allen we have a description of his occupations in his garden, "I am now as busy in planting for myself, as I was lately in planting for another. And I thank God for every wet day and for every fog, which gives me the headache, but prospers my works. They will indeed outlive me (if they do not die in their travels from place to place; for my garden, like my life, seems to me every day to want correction, I hope at least for the better) but I am pleased to think that my trees will afford shade and fruit to others, when I shall want them no more." As age and infirmities grew upon him, Pope wisely prepared a pleasant retreat; "I have," says he in a letter to Warburton, "lived much by myself of late, partly through ill-health, and partly to amuse myself with little improvements in my garden and house, to which possibly I shall (if I live) be soon more confined." Even the ambitious Bolingbroke deigned to bestow some of his attention on his gardens; "Pray, my lord," says Swift in a letter to him, "how are the gardens? Have you taken down the mount and removed the yew hedges? Have you not bad weather for the spring corn? Has Mr. Pope gone farther in his ethic poems, and is the headland sown with wheat?" All his battles in Spain did not make the Earl of Peterborough lose his relish for rustic employments; he tells Pope he shall write to him upon the side of his wheel-barrow.

It was probably about this time that the taste for the genuine style of old English gardening began to waver. Thus in Pope's correspondence we have an account of "a consultation lately held about designing a princely garden. Several critics were of several opinions. One declared that he would not have too much art in it. *** There were some who could not bear evergreens, and called them Nevergreens; some who were angry at them only when cut into shapes, and gave the modern gardeners the name of Evergreen Tailors. Some who had no dislike to cones and cubes, but would have them cut in forest trees; and some who were in a passion against every thing in shape, even against clipt hedges, which they called green walls." But even earlier than this period the gardeners of the last century had begun to be vitiated. The humourist in gardening, who gives an account of his labours in the Spectator, was a sort of precursor to our present landscape-gardeners. A foreigner would take his garden to be a natural wilderness, and one of the uncultivated parts of the country. His plantations ran into as great a wildness as their nature would permit, and he is pleased, when he is walking in a labyrinth of his own raising, not to know whether the next tree he meets with is an apple or an oak, an elm or a pear-tree. Then again he takes particular care to let a little stream which flows through his garden, run in the same manner as it would do through an open field, so that it generally passes through banks of violets and primroses, plats of willow or other plants that seem to be of its own producing. However faulty the humourist may have been in his taste, he was yet a true lover

of gardening. "You must know, Sir," says he, " that I look upon the pleasure which we take in a garden, as one of the most innocent delights in human life. A garden was the habitation of our first parents before the fall. It is naturally apt to fill the mind with calmness and tranquillity, and to lay all its turbulent passions at rest. It gives us a great insight into the contrivance and wisdom of Providence, and suggests innumerable subjects for meditation. I cannot but think the very complacency and satisfaction which a man takes in these works of nature, to be a laudable, if not a virtuous habit of mind.”

Towards the middle of the last century, a grievous and visible change took place in our horticultural system. Our straight common-sense gravel-walks that, with mathematical correctness, led us the nearest way between two points, were bent into all the undulations and meanders of a German tobacco-pipe; the venerable screens of yew and holly, which cherished and protected every neighbouring flower, were swept away root and branch; the Tritons lost their watery dominion, and sacrilegious hands attacked even the long lines of ancient oaks, which formed so fine an approach to every old mansion. Even the solid patient sun-dials, which, in a climate like this, are doomed to exercise their functions so sparingly, but which yet, in cloud and in sunshine, bore on their plates some moral saw for the edification of the inquirer-even they were cast from their bases, as though the new generation were afraid to be told how fast the pinions of Time were moving. Nay, even the presiding deities of the spot were torn from their pedestals. The Apollo Belvidere was compelled to quit the scene, where, for some half a century, he had been watching the flight of his arrow with laudable patience; and the Diana was carried away before she had achieved her purpose of drawing forth the arrow, upon which she had been intent for an equal number of years. The ruins of the alcoves served to fill up the sunk fences, and instead of a garden furnished with all the richest caprices of art, the houses of our gentry were surrounded by grounds which only seemed to form a portion of their parks.

In Shenstone's time, the new fashion had not arrived at its height. There were still pillars, and urns, and fountains, and summer-houses left, though the rectilinear disposition of more ancient times was abolished. The Leasowes were a sort of æra in the art. Yet was Shenstone, though carried away by the prevailing taste, much attached in his heart to the antique style. His idea of a "Lover's walk" was in the true old feeling, with "assignation seats with proper mottoes, urns to faithful lovers, trophies, garlands, &c." Oliver Goldsmith, who ought to have known better, has ridiculed what he did not understand in his paper on the tenants of the Leasowes. I, for one, agree perfectly with Mr. Truepenny, the button-maker, when he employed his shears to some purpose, and clipped the hedges; nor do I altogether dissent from the Sea-captain's taste, "in making Chinese temples and cage-work summer-houses." In a modern garden, I am sure, one may walk for ever without a possibility of resting oneself.

But hitherto I have been writing about what many of your readers, Mr. Editor, in all probability, never beheld; for these fine old places are disappearing year after year. If it would not consume too much space, I would describe that ever-venerated scene in which all my ear

liest and happiest years were passed. I would describe the avenue of mossy elms which led to it, its many regular smooth-cropped walks, the square pigeon-house (sure appurtenance to an ancient mansion), and more than all, that pleasant south alcove, upon whose walls the name of many a kind and excellent friend was registered; yea, and many a pencilled rhyme of passing sweetness. However, I know not, if once I ventured upon this theme, where I should conclude; so I must content myself with referring all whom it may concern to the Memoirs of that true Sylvanus, John Evelyn, for a bona fide plan of an an-cient garden; and to my Lord Bacon's Essay on Gardens, if they wish to see the beau-ideal of such a place :-the description of his garden is quite poetical. Where shall we find a more beautiful passage than the following, unless it be perchance the Duke's first speech in Twelfth Night? It would almost persuade one that the heart which conceived such thoughts could know no wickedness: -" And because the breath of flowers is farre sweeter in the aire (where it comes und goes like the warbling of musicke) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight, than to know what be the flowers and plants which doe best perfume the aire."

I always envy what Cowper calls "the occupations of a retired gentleman in his garden." Most certainly, a gardener is a happy man. He is a labourer in the primitive trade. His is not an occupation of mere daily drudgery, like the wretched mechanic's, whose labours pass through his rapid hands, and are seen no more. He has a family around him, fair, beautiful, and flourishing, whose growth and welfare he watches over with a parent's love. He has friends, old friends, who have long been his faithful companions. For the many members of his vegetable family he feels all the varieties of human sympathy. The stout and sturdy oak excites his veneration and respect; he honours it for its bold endurance of the storms, and the unyielding hardiness of its frame. The graceful Acacia is the woman of the grove. But chiefly over his flowers does the rapture of a gardener's heart pour itself forth. He is their father-to him they owe their birth-he has fostered and cherished them he has watched their crisp leaves bursting from the soil, and has protected their tender infancy from the insect and the worm-he is attached to them by the unknown gratitude which they owe him, and when in their full maturity they expand into their summer beauty, and pour out their exquisite perfume, to gaze on them, and to inhale their sweetness, is his "exceeding great reward." Unlike a mortal progeny, in them the hopes which he has formed, are seldom disappointed; generation succeeds generation, each fresh and blooming as the former. Trust me, a gardener is a very happy man.

R.

VALENTINE WRITING.

By a most singular arrangement, the day in which a Christian bishop suffered martyrdom 1500 years ago, has been for a long course of time commemorated by the effusions of earthly love and fancy. Not one of the saints days in our calendar, we may safely say, has been so honoured by the Muses. Little dreamed the emperor Valerianus, when he gave the order which doomed this persecuted individual to the block, that he was bestowing a name upon a day to be held in a pleasant memory by youthful swains and blushing damsels-a day in which the spirit of martyrdom has little place, unless indeed the Muse may be doomed to act the part of the deceased saint, which, I believe, is pretty often the case.

The day, however, and its occupation, have been somehow long settled, and it is really a pleasant one. It is a day to make a poet feel himself somebody. The little children crowd about him in full dependence on his power of expressing in appropriate language their babyloves. And perhaps some full-grown youth, of greater modesty than ordinary, whose poetical spirit hardly keeps pace with the ardour of his passion, may put in his claim to the like indulgence. It is even possible that the discreet poet may be entrusted with secrets of yet more overpowering importance; and his may be the pleasant lot of touching the flinty heart of some yet insensible swain, by affecting representations of long-concealed maiden tenderness. What a proud and happy man is the bard then! He walks, and he has a right to walk, with a head more erect than usual, conscious that he bears about with him a hundred secrets, in revealing the least of which he might bring whole armies of lads and lasses, grave fathers, mothers and aunts, upon him, exulting, however, in the reflection that there is a power in alliance with him which will effectually enable him to elude discovery. If he be of a malevolent disposition, it might, perhaps, gratify him to witness the torturing anxiety of the lover for whom he has penned a sonnet (which he has been obliged to transcribe and alter at least a dozen times before it was sufficiently tender) under the uncertainty of the fair one's having received it at all, or at any rate having given it a favourable reception. And if it should happen (such things have been) that the fair one herself, ignorant that her counsel has been previously engaged on the other side, should call in his aid and require him to weave an appropriate answer to his own rhymes,-how gratifying, how pleasant to the vanity of the man and the poet!

Not but that in these degenerate days he feels his consequence greatly diminished, when every eighth man is an "universal genius," when people are not content with being their own doctors, lawyers, and barbers, but " every man" must be "his own" poet too. It is a certain fact (at least "we have the best authority" for so stating) that young ladies and gentlemen at boarding-schools are regularly taught to make verses; and it would be a great shame indeed if Valentine's day found them unfurnished with appropriate rhymes.

As I am free to confess, that in my time I have penned many Valentines, and after my reputation was established have been professionally consulted on many more, in which it was thought a little criticism if not alteration might be advisable, I have in my possession a consider

able stock of original poems of this sort; and from among them have selected a few which some of your readers may, perhaps, mentally compare to the addresses of love-sick Troubadours to their ladies. Now to tell the whole truth, it is part of my theory on the subject of Valentine writing, that the style of those worthies most befits compo sitions meet for an admirer to offer and for a lady's ear to listen to; and I am for considering this most ancient feast as a faint image of those principles of gallantry which graced the southern revelries in the bright reign of love and song. I see in the merry circle that gathers on this happy eve many faces calculated to form a most respectable Cour d'amour, and to determine perplexed "passages of love," particularly those of other people. The sitting is not held sous l'ormel to be sure, but that is because our gala-day is in February, not on bright May-day, whose genial influence we can only counterfeit by a smiling fire. The poet lauds his mistress as devoutly and delicately; and though the chill of the season sometimes operates unfavourably on the ardour of his fancy, yet he sings with greater freedom from our throwing around him a veil of conventional incognito, while we still leave him sufficiently unmasked to receive, sooner or later, the smile of his mistress,-a reward quite as great as any golden violet awarded by the academy of the Gai Saber.

To return to my subject:-Let me not forfeit my claim to the confidence of the young ladies and gentlemen of the present day,-a confidence of which I am exceedingly jealous. I can assure them, that of the pieces I send you there is not one which will now, hurt the feelings of a single individual. I have so carefully selected them, that I may venture to subjoin critical remarks, which once I dared not have uttered to the winds. Yet to my mind each poem brings a crowd of recollections, which no doubt greatly heightens its interest as I transcribe; I wish my readers could follow me in those feelings. The first I shall send you is pretty, yet it is a little babyish or so; and I should suspect it to be written by a young lady only just sixteen, from the juvenility of the expressions and the clink of the verse.

It is the hour of morning's prime,
The young day of the year,
The day of days before the time
When brighter hopes appear.

It is the time of early love

When suns but faintly shine;
It is the day, all days above,
The sweet St. Valentine!

The cold snows on the meadows lie,

And not a leaf is green,

Yet here and there in yonder sky

A gleam of light is seen.

So Love, young Love, 'mid storms and snow

Darts forth a light divine;

So darker days the brightness shew

Of thine, St. Valentine!

The next is from a gentleman of course, and is much more in the Troubadour style; yet I should greatly doubt whether the lady who received this had any just grounds for reliance on her lover's sincerity.