Temple also wrote on gardens, with a safer swing for his learning and his taste; traces of what his taste was in such matters are still discernible about his old home of Moor Park, in Surrey. It lies some forty miles from London, on the way to Southampton and the Isle of Wight, near the old town of Farnham, where there is a venerable bishop’s palace worth the seeing; a mile away one may find the terraces of Sir William’s old garden, and the mossy dial under which he ordered his heart to be buried. Another interest, moreover, attaches to these Moor Park gardens, which will make them doubly worth a visit. On their terraces and under their trees used to pace and meditate that strange creature Jonathan Swift, who was in his young days a _protégé_ or secretary of Sir William Temple; and there, too, in the same shade, and along the same terraces, used to stroll and meditate in different mood, poor Mistress Hester Johnson, the “Stella” of Swift’s life-long love-dream. We shall meet these people again. But I leave Sir William Temple, commending to your attention a delightful little essay of Charles Lamb, in his volume of Elia, upon “The Genteel Style in Writing.” It gives a fair though flattering notion of the ways of Sir William’s life, and of the way of his work. _John Dryden._ Of course we know John Dryden’s name a great deal better than we know Sir William Temple’s; better, perhaps, than we know any other name of that period. And yet do we know his poems well? Are there any that you specially cherish and doat upon? any that kindle your sympathies easily into blaze? any that give electric expression to your own poetic yearnings, and put you upon quick and enchanting drift into that empyrean of song whereto the great poets decoy us? I doubt if there is much of Dryden which has this subtle influence upon you; certainly it has not upon me. There are the great Cecilia odes, which hold their places in the reading-books, with their “Double--double--double beat Of the thundering drum;” and the royal “Philip’s warlike son, Aloft in awful state; The lovely Thais by his side, --Like a blooming Eastern bride In flower of youth and beauty’s pride;” all which we read over and over, always with an ambitious vocalism which the language invites, but, I think, with not much hearty unction. And yet, notwithstanding the little that we recall of this man’s work, he did write an enormous amount of verse, in all metres, and of all lengths. All the poems that Milton ever published would hardly fill the space necessary for a full synopsis of what John Dryden wrote. But let us begin at the beginning.