I asked her what first inspired her with such fondness for gardening, and how she had acquired so much skill and taste in this elegant art? She blushed and said she was afraid I should think her romantic, if she were to confess that she had caught both the taste and the passion, as far as she possessed either, from an early and intimate acquaintance with the Paradise Lost, of which she considered the beautiful descriptions of scenery and plantations as the best precepts for landscape gardening. "Milton," she said, "both excited the taste and supplied the rules. He taught the art and inspired the love of it." From the gardens of Paradise the transition was easy and natural. On my asking her opinion of this portrait, as drawn by Milton, she replied, "That she considered Eve, in her state of innocence, as the most beautiful model of the delicacy, propriety, grace, and elegance of the female character which any poet ever exhibited. Even after her fall," added she, "there is something wonderfully touching in her remorse, and affecting in her contrition." "We are probably," replied I, "more deeply affected with the beautifully contrite expressions of repentance in our first parents, from being so deeply involved in the consequences of the offense which occasioned it." "And yet," replied she, "I am a little affronted with the poet, that while, with a noble justness, he represents Adam's grief at his expulsion, as chiefly arising from his being banished from the presence of his Maker, the sorrows of Eve seem too much to arise from being banished from her flowers. The grief, though never grief was so beautifully eloquent, is rather too exquisite, her substantial ground for lamentation considered." Seeing me going to speak, she stopped me with a smile, saying, "I see by your looks that you are going, with Mr. Addison, to vindicate the poet, and to call this a just appropriation of the sentiment to the sex; but surely the disproportion in the feeling here is rather too violent, though I own the loss of her flowers _might_ have aggravated any common privation. There is, however, no female character in the whole compass of poetry in which I have ever taken so lively an interest, and no poem that ever took such powerful possession of my mind."