A verse letter on the use of riches and the follies of taste, addressed to the patron of English Palladianism. Its lines on gardens, “Consult the Genius of the Place in all”, became the first principle of the English landscape garden.
Pope (1688–1744) had already mocked the clipped garden in an essay in The Guardian (no. 173, 29 September 1713), which ends with a mock nurseryman’s catalogue of topiary for sale: Adam and Eve in yew, a St George in box, and other “greens” in the shapes of men and animals. Joseph Addison had made a similar case a year before in The Spectator (no. 414, 25 June 1712), regretting that English gardeners cut trees into cones, globes and pyramids instead of humouring nature. Pope laid out his own small garden by the Thames at Twickenham from 1719, with a grotto under the road.
The Epistle to Burlington, later the fourth of his Moral Essays, praises Burlington’s good sense and ridicules the vast, symmetrical and joyless estate of an imaginary lord, “Timon”, where every alley has its brother and half the platform just reflects the other. Against it Pope sets a short rule of composition: the designer should consult the genius of the place, the character of the ground, which tells him whether to raise or sink, to open a view or to close it; he should confound, surprise and vary, and conceal the bounds.
The book, part by part
I Lines 1–46: false taste
Wealth without sense: collectors and builders who copy without understanding.
II Lines 47–98: the genius of the place
Good sense in building and planting; the rule of consulting the genius of the place; variety, surprise and concealed boundaries.
III Lines 99–176: Timon’s villa
The satire of an estate laid out by symmetry alone, too large to be enjoyed.
IV Lines 177–204: the good use of riches
The patron who builds roads, bridges, harbours and churches.