aimer qu'à admirer." On his death, Rapin thus speaks of him: "Il n'y eut jamais une plus belle ame jointe à un plus bel esprit. Le plus grand de tous les éloges est, que le peuple l'a pleuré; et chacun s'est plaint de sa mort comme de la perte d'un ami, ou de celle d'un bienfacteur."

The name of Boileau is too interesting to be overlooked. Many of his letters and pages discover the delight he took in his garden at Auteuil. In his epistle to Lamoignon, he describes his seat there as his "bless'd abode," his "dear delicious shades,” and he then paints the pleasures of his country seat :

Give me these shades, these forests, and these fields,

And the soft sweets that rural quiet yields;

Oh, leave me to the fresh, the fragrant breeze,
And let me here awhile enjoy my ease.
Let me Pomona's plenteous blessings crop,
And see rich autumn's ripen'd burden drop,
Till Bacchus with full clusters crowns the year,
And gladdens with his load the vintager.

His celebrated epistle to Anthony, his old gardener, not only shews the kind master, but his own love to his garden. I cannot refrain from quoting a few lines from Lempriere: "As a poet, Boilieu has deservedly obtained the applauses of every man of genius and taste. Not only his countrymen boast of the superior effusions of his muse, but foreigners feel and admire the graces, the strength and harmony of his verse, and that delicacy of satire, and energy of style, by which he raised himself to immortality." Another of

his biographers says: "La religion, qui éclaira ses derniers momens, avoit animé toute sa vie." The author of the Pursuits of Literature thus speaks of him: "The most perfect of all modern writers, in true taste and judgment. His sagacity was unerring; he combined every ancient excellence, and appears original even in the adoption of acknowledged thoughts and allusions. He is the just and adequate representative of Horace, Juvenal, and Perseus, united, without one indecent blemish; and for my own part, I have always considered him as the most finished gentleman that ever wrote." In his Life, translated by Ozell, we are told, that "he was full of sentiments of humanity, mildness, and justice. He censured vice, and sharply attacked the bad taste of his time, without one spark of envy, or calumny. Whatever shocked truth, raised in him an indignation which he could not master, and which accounts for that energy and fire which pervades his satires. The sight of any learned man in want, made him so uneasy, that he could not forbear lending money. His good nature and justice did farther appear in his manner of recompensing his domestics, and by his liberality to the poor. He gave by his will fifty thousand livres to the small parishes adjoining the church of Notre Dame; ten thousand livres to his valet de chambre, and five thousand to an old woman who had served him a long time. But he was not contented to bestow his benevolence at his death, and when he was no longer in a condition of enjoying his estate himself, he was, all his life long, studious in seeking opportunities of doing good of

fices." Part of this is confirmed by another biographer: "Une piété sincere, une foi vive et une charité si grande, qu'elle ne lui a presque fait reconnoitre d'autres héritiers que les pauvres." The Lettres of Mad. la Comtesse de la Riviere, and those of de Sevigné, frequently mention the charm which attended the visits of Boileau.* Rabutin du Bussy thus speaks of him, in a letter to the Pere Rapin, after eulogizing Moliere: "Despréaux est encore merveilleuse; personne ne'crit avec plus de pureté; ses pensées sont fortes, et ce qui m'en plait, tou jours vraies."

The above is a very cursory and brief allusion to what might be gathered respecting those superb gardens in France, whose costly and magnificent decorations so charmed many of our English nobility and gentry, when travelling there, during the periods of Charles II., James II., William, Anne, and during subsequent reigns. One need recur only to a very few, as to Rose, who was sent there by Lord Essex, to view Versailles; to George London, who was commissioned to go there, not only by the same Rose,

* I will conclude by mentioning a justly celebrated man, who, it seems was not over fond of his garden, though warmly attached both to Boileau, and to Mad. de Sevigné,-I mean that most eloquent preacher Bossuet, of whom a biographer, after stating that he was so absorbed in the study of the ancient fathers of the church, "qu'il ne se permettoit que des délassemens fort courts. Il ne se promênoit que rarement même dans son jardin. Son jardinier lui dit un jour: Si je plantois des Saint Augustins, et des Saint Chrysostomes, vous les viendriez voir; mais pour vos arbres, vous ne vous en souciez guere."

d

but who afterwards accompanied the Earl of Portland, King William's ambassador; but to Evelyn, Addison, Dr. Lister, Kent, when he accompanied Lord Burlington through France to Italy; to the Earl of Cork and Orrery (the translator of Pliny's Letters), whose gardens at Marston, and at Caledon, and whose letters from Italy, all shew the eagerness with which he must have viewed the gardens of France, when passing through the provinces towards Florence; to Ray, Lady M. W. Montague, Bolingbroke, Peterborough, Smollet, John Wilks, John Horne (when he met Mr. Sterne, or designed to meet him, at Toulouse), to Gray, Walpole, R. P. Knight, who must have passed through the rich provinces of France, as, in his work on Taste, he speaks of "terraces and borders intermixed with vines and flowers, (as I have seen them in Italian villas, and in some old English gardens in the same style), where the mixture of splendour, richness, and neatness, was beautiful and pleasing in the highest degree;" and to the lately deceased Sir U. Price, who must also have passed through France, to view (with the eagerness with which he did view) the rich and magnificently decorated gardens of Italy, "aided with the splendour and magnificence of art," their ballustrades, their fountains, basons, vases and statues, and which he dwells on in his Essays with the same enthusiasm as when he there contemplated the works of Titian, Paul Veronese, and other great masters. Indeed, those pages where he regrets the demolition of many of our old English gardens, and when he dwells on the probability that even Raphael, Giulio

Romano, and M. Angelo, (which last planted the famous cypresses in the garden of the Villa d'Este) were consulted on the decorations of some of the old Italian ones; these pages at once shew the fascinating charms of his classic pen. *

England can boast too of very great names, who have been attached to this art, and most zealously patronized it, though they have not written on the subject:-Lord Burleigh, Lord Hudson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Capell, who honoured himself by several years correspondence with La Quintinye; William the Third,-for Switzer tells us, that "in the least interval of ease, gardening took up a greater part of his time, in which he was not only a delighter, but likewise a great judge," the Earl of Essex, whom the mild and benevolent Lord William Russell said "was the worthiest, the justest, the sincerest, and the most concerned for the public, of any man he ever knew;" Lord William Russell himself, too, on whom Thomson says,

Bring every sweetest flower, aad let me strew
grave where Russell lies,

The

whose fall Switzer feelingly laments, as one of the best of masters, and encouragers of arts and sciences,

* Mr. Worlidge, who wrote during part of the reigns of Charles II. and James II. judiciously observes, that "the glory of the French palaces, often represented to our English eyes in sculpture, are adorned with their beauteous gardens before them; which wanting, they would seem without lustre or grandeur."