, and though I thought I had said too much already, it encouraged me to go on. "I repeat, that next to religion, whatever relates to human manners, is most attracting to human creatures. To turn from conversation to composition. What is it that excites so feeble an interest, in perusing that finely written poem of the Abbe de Lille, 'Les Jardins?' It is because his garden has no cultivators, no inhabitants, no men and women. What confers that powerful charm on the descriptive parts of Paradise Lost? A fascination, I will venture to affirm, paramount to all the lovely and magnificent scenery which adorns it. Eden itself with all its exquisite landscape, would excite a very inferior pleasure did it exhibit only inanimate beauties. 'Tis the proprietors, 'tis the inhabitants, 'tis the live stock, of Eden, which seize upon the affections, and twine about the heart. The gardens, even of Paradise, would be dull without the gardeners. 'Tis mental excellence, 'tis moral beauty which completes the charm. Where this is wanting, landscape poetry, though it be read with pleasure, yet the interest it raises is cold. It is admired, but seldom quoted. It leaves no definite idea on the mind. If general, it is indistinct; if minute, tedious."

"It must be confessed," said Sir John, "that some poets are apt to forget that the finest representation of nature is only the scene, not the object; the canvas, not the portrait. We had indeed some time ago, so much of this gorgeous scene-painting, so much splendid poetical botany, so many amorous flowers, and so many vegetable courtships; so many wedded plants; roots transformed to nymphs, and dwelling in emerald palaces; that some how or other, truth and probability and nature, and man slipped out of the picture, though it must be allowed that genius held the pencil."

"In Mason's 'English Garden,'" replied I, "Alcander's precepts would have been cold, had there been no personification. The introduction of character dramatizes what else would have been frigidly didactic. Thomson enriches his landscape with here and there a figure, drawn with more correctness than warmth, with more nature than spirit, and exalts it everywhere by moral allusion and religious reference. The scenery of Cowper is perpetually animated with sketches of character, enlivened with portraits from real life, and the exhibition of human manners and passions. His most exquisite descriptions owe their vividness to moral illustration. Loyalty,