Not so subtle in his irony nor so engaging in his literary style as Addison, Pope was however the more forcibly satirical, maliciously spiteful, and elfishly humorous. His keen wit seized upon the proper psychological moment for following up Addison’s comparatively mild exposure with an attack that did as much as, or more than, anything else to bring about that rapid decline of Topiarian art that quickly followed. Pope had evidently the genius of a great soldier, who delivers his fiercest attack when the enemy is wavering. As Pope’s essay is not by any means well known, neither is it especially easy of access, I need not apologise for quoting freely from it. Pope, however, believed with Dryden that satire was— “The boldest way, if not the best, To tell men freely of their foulest faults, To laugh at their vain deeds and vainer thoughts,” and in the course of his essay he allowed his sarcastic mockery to find expression here and there in a manner common enough in his time but which would be likely to offend the ears of modern polite folk, consequently I have in a few instances forestalled the editorial blue-pencil. “I lately,” writes Pope, “took a particular friend of mine to my house in the country, not without some apprehension that it could afford little entertainment to a man of his polite taste, particularly in architecture and gardening, who had so long been conversant with all that is beautiful and great in either. But it was a pleasant surprise to me, to hear him often declare, he had found in my little retirement that beauty which he always thought wanting in most of the celebrated seats, or, if you will, villas, of the nation. This he described to me in those verses, with which Martial begins one of his epigrams: “‘Our friend Faustinus’ country seat I’ve seen: No myrtles, placed in rows, and idly green, No widow’d plantain, nor clipp’d box-tree, there The useless soil unprofitably share; But simple nature’s hand, with nobler grace, Diffuses artless beauties o’er the place.’ “There is certainly something in the amiable simplicity of unadorned nature, that spreads over the mind a more noble sort of tranquillity, and a loftier sensation of pleasure, than can be raised from the nicer scenes of art.” After a reference to Homer’s account of the Garden of Alcinous, and Sir William Temple’s remarks upon it, Pope proceeds: “How contrary to this simplicity is the modern practice of gardening! We seem to make it our study to recede from Nature, not only in the various tonsure of greens into the most regular and formal shapes, but even in monstrous attempts beyond the reach of the art itself. We run into sculpture, and are yet better pleased to have our trees in the most awkward figures of men and animals, than in the most regular of their own. [Illustration: CROWN GARDEN, MUNTHAM COURT, SUSSEX ]