"Now, is it not a shame, after this, to hear our Lakers in 'Kendal green,' and our Bucolical Cockneys, crying out (the latter in a wilderness of bricks and mortar) about 'Nature,' and Pope's 'artificial in-door habits?' Pope had seen all of nature that _England_ alone can supply. He was bred in Windsor Forest, and amidst the beautiful scenery of Eton; he lived familiarly and frequently at the country seats of Bathurst, Cobham, Burlington, Peterborough, Digby, and Bolingbroke; amongst whose seats was to be numbered _Stowe_. He made his own little five acres' a model to Princes, and to the first of our artists who imitated nature. Warton thinks 'that the most engaging of _Kent's_ works was also planned on the model of Pope's,--at least in the opening and retiring shades of Venus's Vale.' "It is true that Pope was infirm and deformed; but he could walk, and he could ride (he rode to Oxford from London at a stretch), and he was famous for an exquisite eye. On a tree at Lord Bathurst's is carved, 'Here Pope sang,'--he composed beneath it. Bolingbroke, in one of his letters, represents them both writing in a hayfield. No poet ever admired Nature more, or used her better, than Pope has done, as I will undertake to prove from his works, prose and verse, if not anticipated in so easy and agreeable a labour. I remember a passage in Walpole, somewhere, of a gentleman who wished to give directions about some willows to a man who had long served Pope in his grounds: 'I understand, sir,' he replied: 'you would have them hang down, sir, _somewhat poetical_.' Now if nothing existed but this little anecdote, it would suffice to prove Pope's taste for _Nature_, and the impression which he had made on a common-minded man. But I have already quoted Warton and Walpole (_both_ his enemies), and, were it necessary, I could amply quote Pope himself for such tributes to _Nature_ as no poet of the present day has even approached.