Temple, William; Sieveking, Albert Forbes: Upon the gardens of Epicurus: with other XVIIth century garden essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908)

xlvi INTRODUCTION
the agreement of their learning and manners ”—he
adulates with more pardonable hyperbole :—
Learning would rather chuse
Her Bodley, or her Vatican to lose;
All things that are but writ and printed there,
In his unbounded breast engraven are.
And before Pope, he discovered that
Let Nature and let Art do what they please,
When all’s done Life is an incurable Disease.
As writers in praise of Gardens and Country
life, the palm will, I think, be given by all modern
readers to Andrew Marvell. Genuine as is the love
of both for the Country—and to Cowley the desire
for retirement and repose was assuredly no pose—
Cowley’s voice is that of the scholar and the student,
and his verse smells of the lamp and grates of the
file, while Marvell’s song brings the magic of the
meadow, the breath of the flowers and new-mown
hay, the swish of the scythe, and the lamp of the
glow-worm right across the centuries, before our eyes
and into our hearts—and we love Marvell’s poems,
while at the best we can only admire and sympathise
with Cowley’s verse.
The latter’s elaborate set-piece on Plants we re-
cognise at once for what it purported to be, viz. an