COMMENTARY

ON THE

FIRST BOOK.

INTRODUCTION.

GARDENING imparts to rural scenery what a noble and graceful deportment confers upon the human frame: it is not an imitative art, it is more, it is an endeavour to bestow on each individual reality, those beauties which judicious imitation would select from many, and combine in one fictitious representation. That the son of Achilles was as much inferior in person to his father, as is the most perfect human forms are to the finest statues, the declaration of the skilful Philostratus; and amounts to a full acknowledgment of the inferiority of individual nature to selective art. If, therefore, by any means the original can be brought under the obedience of those laws, by which she is imitated to advantage, an art is then devised as much superior to those which merely deal in imitation, as motion and reality are superior to fiction and inanimate rest: it is only in right of their constitution and laws, that the imitative arts are entitled

to any preference; but these are now transferred and set over a more noble dominion. (A)

To establish their empire, and pronounce their decrees in the province of Landscape, is the purpose of the foregoing Poem; to mark the connexion, to point out the principles, and sometimes to extend the application of the precepts delivered by the Poet, is the purpose of this Commentary: it was written originally in the margin of the Poem, and has been so fortunate as not only to receive the approbation, but actually now to appear before the world, under the sanction of its Author. Thus honoured, it is little solicitous concerning the reception

it

may there meet with: for should it even come short of the favourable expectations he has been pleased to entertain, and fail to promote the delightful art it is designed to serve, one private end, at least, must still be answered, and my best pride will receive its ample satisfaction from seeing my name thus publicly connected with that of Mr. Mason.

From what is here said, it is obvious that the poetical merits of the English Georgic are not under my consideration; it will be inferred, perhaps, that I am precluded from giving an opinion on that head; I am so: yet why have I studiously considered and noted the Poem? The necessary answer to this question will give my judgment; in terms very general, I grant; but thus

alone, by leaving it for others to draw the inference, I am enabled to evade the prohibition I am under.

I confess that the subject also, exclusive of the manner in which it has been treated, has charms for me sufficient to engage my attention: If reason has her sports, they are worthy the pursuit of reason; and I am far from concurring with the mathematical reader of Virgil, who, having perused the Æneid, laid down the book, and then contemptuously pronounced that it might, perhaps, be very good; but for his part he could not see the use of it, because, forsooth, it proved nothing.

In the class with this sentence we must also rank the surly and sullen speculation which would insinuate reflections on an art that successfully undertakes to embellish and render Nature universally lovely. To extinguish the finest faculty of the human mind, or pervert the natural taste for the pleasures thence derived, will not, I trust, however arrogantly claimed, be generally considered as the business of reason; and therefore we are constrained to account for the savage and cynical censures which would deprive us of the delights of Poetry and Gardening, by referring them to an absolute ignorance of the respective suhjects, and a total defect of the imagination.

But it is so far from being the true business of reason

to degrade, that to cultivate and enlarge the imagination is, perchance, the happiest fruit of her genuine researches. It is by means of this sense of the intellect that our convictions, in a thousand instances, become our pleasures; and by facilitating the comprehension of remote objects it is that reason renders them the objects of this faculty; we are thus rendered sensible of the beauty of holiness, the beauty of virtue, the beauty of system, and even of the beauty of theorem; and shall an easier accessibility derogate from our sense of the beauty of nature? when reason is not disgraced in thus referring her issues to the imagination, I can see no just cause why our educated sense of beauty should be sullenly refused the full enjoyment of those objects which, by the benevolent Author of Nature, were originally adapted to her immediate possession.

It is not however without some discriminating powers of the mind that the beauties of Nature are even discerned; the imagination must be correct and pure to select with judgment the scenes that are most worthy of contemplation. And if to enjoy require an act of the cultivated understanding, it will not be denied that to open the sources of enjoyment, and to design and execute, so as to give pleasure to the taste of an improved intellect, demands the exertion of much greater powers of the mind. What, for example, can be accomplished without a critical knowledge of the rules of composition,

and a vigorous fancy to forecast, in each particular instance, the future effects of their judicious application? Can a ready observation to detect a latent grace, and to discern the advantages it is capable of receiving from art, be dispensed with? And can the ignorance of any mechanical science be supposed in the genuine Gardener, whose occupation is a perpetual display of even consummate skill in the comprehensive theories of Painting and Architecture? But, referring my reader to the Author's motto, let me here cease farther to apologize for the liberality of an art which he, who of all mankind best understood the true business of reason, has not disdained to consider as "the perfection of civility," or to rank as "the purest of human pleasures."

The plan of the ENGLISH GARDEN is made to correspond with its subject, which is single, and in which the parts, however numerous, are evidently the parts of one uniform whole. The practical precepts, delivered in the three latter books of the Poem in like manner, are but the amplifications of one fundamental and universally pervading principle, to the doctrine and establishment of which, as a common basis, the commencing book has been accordingly assigned by the Poet.