Of course the original text _means_,
though the English translator has not expressed that meaning--"Let there
be no force _used_ in religion."
When William Cobbett was a boy of eleven years of age he worked in the
garden of the Bishop of Winchester at Farnham. Having heard much of Kew
gardens he resolved to change his locality and his master. He started
off for Kew, a distance of about thirty miles, with only thirteen pence
in his pocket. The head gardener at Kew at once engaged his services. A
few days after, George the Fourth, then Prince of Wales, saw the boy
sweeping the lawns, and laughed heartily at his blue smock frock and
long red knotted garters. But the poor gardener's boy became a public
writer, whose productions were not exactly calculated to excite the
merriment of princes.
Most poets have a painter's eye for the disposition of forms and
colours. Kent's practice as a painter no doubt helped to make him what
he was as a landscape-gardener. When an architect was consulted about
laying out the grounds at Blenheim he replied, "you must send for a
landscape-painter:" he might have added--"_or a poet_."
Our late Laureate, William Wordsworth, exhibited great taste in his
small garden at Rydal Mount. He said of himself--very truly though not
very modestly perhaps,--but modesty was never Wordsworth's
weakness--that nature seemed to have fitted him for three callings--that
of the poet, the critic on works of art, and the landscape-gardener.
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