[35] See Pope’s paper in the Guardian (173) for some rather elaborate foolery about topiary work.  “All art,” he maintains, “consists in the imitation and study of nature.”  “We seem to make it our study to recede from nature, not only in the various tonsure of greens into the most regular and formal shapes, but,” etc., etc.  Addison, too, Spectator 414, June 25, 1712, upholds “the rough, careless strokes of nature” against “the nice touches and embellishments of art,” and complains that “our British gardeners, instead of humoring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible.  Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids.  We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush.  I do not know whether I am singular in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure.”  See also Spectator, 477, for a pretty scheme of a garden laid out with “the beautiful wildness of nature.”  Gilbert West’s Spenserian poem “Education,” 1751 (see ante, p. 90) contains an attack, in six stanzas, upon the geometric garden, from which I give a single stanza.

    “Alse other wonders of the sportive shears,
    Fair nature mis-adorning, there were found: 
    Globes, spiral columns, pyramids, and piers,
    With sprouting urns and budding statues crowned;
    And horizontal dials on the ground,
    In living box by cunning artists traced;
    And gallies trim, on no long voyage bound
    But by their roots there ever anchored fast,
    All were their bellying sails out-spread to every blast.”

[36] “Essays on Men and Manners,” Shenstone’s Works, Vol.  II.  Dodsley’s edition.

[37] “On Modern Gardening,” Works of the Earl of Orford, London, 1798, Vol.  II.

[38] Graves, “Recollections of Shenstone,” 1788.

[39] “Ward’s English Poets,” Vol.  III. 271.

[40] “Life of Shenstone.”

[41] See ante, p. 90, for his visits to Gilbert West at Wickham.

[42] See especially “A Pastoral Ode,” and “Verses Written toward the Close of the Year 1748.”

[43] “A Description of the Leasowes by R. Dodsley,” Shenstone’s Works, Vol.  II, pp. 287-320 (3d ed.) This description is accompanied with a map.  For other descriptions consult Graves’ “Recollections,” Hugh Miller’s “First Impressions of England,” and Wm. Howitt’s “Homes of the Poets” (1846), Vol.  I. pp. 258-63.  The last gives an engraving of the house and grounds.  Miller, who was at Hagley—­“The British Tempe"-and the Leasowes just a century after Shenstone began to embellish his paternal acres, says that the Leasowes was the poet’s most elaborate poem, “the singularly ingenious composition, inscribed on an English hillside, which employed for twenty long years the taste and genius of Shenstone.”

[44] See “Lady Luxborough’s Letters to Shenstone,” 1775, for a long correspondence about an urn which she was erecting to Somerville’s memory.  She was a sister of Bolingbroke, had a seat at Barrels, and exchanged visits with Shenstone.