To plan that formal, dull, disjointed scene Which once was call'd a garden. He denounces the stiff canals, the clipped yews and holly hedges, and the geometric patterns of 'tonsile box' with the zeal of a reformer. The theory seems to be that a garden ought to look as if it were not a garden. The change of taste, however, was doubtless symptomatic of the growing 'love of nature,' though I do not presume to discuss its merits. It was a development parallel to the literary change implied in the renewed taste for old ballads, for archaic poetry, or what passed for such under the names of Ossian and Rowley, and for Elizabethan literature. Such tastes, however significant of the advent of a literary revolution, did not imply any revolutionary purpose in their cultivators. If Gray loved Spenser, he was even more enthusiastic about Dryden, from whom he professed to have learnt the art of versification. Cowper tried to supersede Pope's Homer. Gray declared that nobody would ever translate Homer as well as Pope. Gray was as orthodox in his literary as in his philosophical profession of faith; and his most avowed disciple Mason was, on the whole, of the same persuasion. In Warton and Beattie there is clearly some anticipation of Scott's romanticism, but Mason's experiments were rather in the classical direction. His 'English Garden' was his most ponderous and unsuccessful performance. In some other efforts he showed a keenness of style, a causticity of satire, which induced the late Mr. Dilke to suggest him (not quite seriously, I fancy) as a possible candidate for the questionable honour of being the real Junius. It would be difficult indeed to imagine that Junius could by any possibility have been a country clergyman, living for the greatest part of the year at a distance from the political gossip of the day, however much interested in the spread of sound Whig principles. It is amusing to read the correspondence between Mason and his two friends Gray and Walpole, and to note how the respectful disciple, reverently receiving from his teachers little hints of criticism—laudatory, it is true, for the most part, but also dashed with tolerably sharp sarcasm—gradually develops into the rather dandified clergyman, anxious to show that the man of the world is not altogether sunk in the rustic parson; that he is no pedant, but a man of taste, and capable of tagging his remarks with bits of fashionable French, and even of occasionally repaying in kind his correspondent's affluence of the latest scandals. Mason's clerical gown did not sit very well upon him, though he seems to have been conscientious and independent and not without some genuine kindliness of nature. But he always gives one the impression of being out of place in his cassock. It would not be easy to find a more quaint expression of the unprofessional turn of mind in a clergyman than a defence of Christianity in one of his sermons. 'If,'