One may with truth further apply to Mr. Pope what was said of Buchanan, that his mind was stored with all the fire, and all the graces of ancient literature. Mr. Pope's attachment to _gardens_, appears not only in his letter to Martha Blount, describing Sir W. Raleigh's seat--but in his own garden at Twickenham, (where, as Mr. Loudon feelingly observes, _only the soil of which now remains_)--and in his letter to Mr. Blount, describing his grotto--but it also bursts forth in many passages throughout his works--and in his celebrated _Guardian_ (No. 173), which attacks, with the keenest wit, "our study to recede from nature," in our giants made out of yews, and lavender pigs with sage growing in their bellies. His epistle to Lord Burlington confirms the charms he felt in studying nature. Mr. Mason, in a note to his English Garden, says, "I had before called Bacon the prophet, and Milton, the herald of true taste in gardening. The former, because, in developing the constituent properties of a princely garden, he had largely expatiated upon that adorned natural wildness which we now deem the essence of the art. The latter, on account of his having made this natural wildness the leading idea in his exquisite description of Paradise. I here call Addison, _Pope_, Kent, &c. the champions of this true taste." As Mr. Mason has added an _&c._, may we not add to these respected names, that of honest old Bridgman? It was the determination of Lord Byron (had his life been longer spared), to have erected, at his own expence, a monument to Pope.[79] We can gather even from his rapid and hurried "Letter on the Rev. W. L. Bowles's Strictures," his attachment to the high name of Pope:--"If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems. What then has ruined it? His ethics. Pope has not this defect; his moral is as pure as his poetry is glorious."--"Pope's charities were his own, and they were noble and extensive, far beyond his fortune's warrant."--"I have loved and honoured the fame and name of that illustrious and unrivalled man, far more than my own paltry renown, and the trashy jingle of the crowd of schools and upstarts, who pretend to rival, or even surpass him. Sooner than a single leaf should be torn from _his_ laurel, it were better that all which these men, and that I, as one of their set, have ever written, should Line trunks, clothe spice, or, fluttering in a row, Befringe the rails of Bedlam, or Soho."