The architect-gardener declared himself very complacent about the dealings with Nature here carried out. “Originally the ground was one continued dead flat, the soil was in general barren, without either wood or water. With so many disadvantages it was not easy to produce anything even tolerable in gardening; but princely munificence overcame all difficulties. What was once a desert is now an Eden!” As controller of the works actively pushed on at Kew, Chambers prospered so much as to be knighted, and to buy Whitton Place, near Hounslow, where the third Duke of Argyll, brother and heir of Jeanie Deans’s protector, himself better known as Lord Islay, had established a nursery of exotic trees, which it was his hobby to naturalise in England. On the death of this duke the cream of his collection seems to have been transplanted to Kew, now become a truly royal botanic garden, unsurpassed in England, with a fame that went on growing till Erasmus Darwin was bound to note it in his herbarium of verse. So sits enthron’d in vegetable pride Imperial _Kew_ by Thames’s glittering side; Obedient sails from realms unfurrow’d bring For her the unnam’d progeny of spring; Attendant nymphs her dulcet mandates hear, And nurse in fostering arms the tender year, Plant the young bulb, inhume the living seed, Prop the weak stem, the erring tendril lead; Or fan in glass-built fanes the stranger flowers With milder gales, and steep with warmer showers. Etc. etc. A much forgotten bard, named Henry Jones, who had been an Irish bricklayer, sought to win patronage, like Stephen Duck, by a whole poem in two cantos on _Kew Gardens_, a versified catalogue of their contents, with a high-pitched description of the Pagoda, and flowing flattery of their master, as to all which the less said the better. The same title was given to one of poor Chatterton’s effusions; but he, reduced in his garret to ape _Junius_ by “patriotic” letters signed _Decimus_, lets the garden run under his pen to weeds of spite and scandal. Hail Kew! thou darling of the sacred Nine, Thou eating-house of verse, where poets dine!