which an Englishman looks to in his. Paintings on a large scale, and illusive perspectives* at the end of their avenues, may be ranked among their characteristic embellishments.

But during the madness of the Revolution, gardens of course could not be allowed alone to remain unaltered; and as Reason and Nature were to carry everything before them, here too the English style was of course adopted with the same enthusiasm and intelligence as they showed in taking up the democratic parts of our constitution. Ermenonville, the seat of Viscomte Girardin, was the first place of consequence laid out in the natural style, and a more complete specimen of French adaptation was never heard of. We have not space even to glance at half its charms; but some idea of the genius loci may be conveyed from the fact that a garden in ruins' was one of its lions. And it seems that the Viscomte kept a band of musicians continually moving about, now on water, now on land, to draw the attention of visitors to the right points of view at the right time of the day; while Madame and her daughters, in a sweet mixture of the natural, the revolutionary, and the romantic, promenaded the grounds, dressed in brown stuff, en amazones,' with black hats; and the young men wore habillements les plus simples et le plus propres à les faire confondre avec les enfans des campagnards. One instance, more Frenchified and ridiculous still, was that of the Moulin Joli' of Watelet. He was a writer of a system of gardening on utilitarian principles; but, having erected divers temples and altars about his grounds, he felt himself bound, in consistency with his theory, to employ occasionally troops of sacrificers and worshippers, to give his gimcrack pagodas and shrines the air of utility! In good keeping with his garden was the encomium of the Prince de Ligne. Allez-y, incrédules! Méditez sur les inscriptions que le gout y a dictées. Méditez avec le sage, soupirez avec l'amant, et bénissez Watelet.'

6

The line of demarcation between the Dutch and French styles is perhaps more imaginary than real. The same exact symmetry everywhere prevails. There is a profusion of ornaments, only on a smaller scale,

'Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees,'—

* An instance of these 'agreeable deceptions,' perfectly characteristic of the French taste of the day, may be given from Evelyn's tour: In the Rue de la Seine is a little garden, which, though very narrow, by the addition of a well-painted perspective, is to appearance greatly enlarged; to this there is another part, supported by arches, in which runs a stream of water, rising in the aviary, out a statue, and seeming to flow for some miles, by being artificially continued in the painting, where it sinks down at the wall.'

† Gaz. Lit. de l'Europe, quoted by Loudon, Encyc., p. 86.

with stagnant and muddy canals and ditches, purposely made for the bridge that is thrown over them; but they abound also in the pleasanter accompaniments of grassy banks and slopes, green terraces, caves, water-works, banqueting-houses set on mounds, with a profusion of trellis-work and green paint — 'furnished,' in the words of Evelyn, with whatever may render the place agreeable, melancholy, and country-like,' not forgetting a hedge of jets d'eau surrounding a parterre.'

In the neighbourhood of Antwerp is a lawn with sheep-like the gray wethers of Salisbury Plain-of stone, and shepherd and dog of the same material to match. Generally, however, the scissors and the yew-tree make up the main furniture' of the garden; and there is something so venerable, and even classical, * about cones and pyramids, and peacocks of box and yew, that we should be loth to destroy a single specimen of the topiary art that was not in flagrant disconnection with the scene around it.

However, the most striking and indispensable feature of a private garden in the Dutch style is the 'lust-huis,' or pleasure-house, hundreds of which overlook every public road and canal in Holland. Perched on the angle of the high wall of the enclosure, or flanking or bestriding the stagnant canalulet which bounds the garden, in all the gaiety and cleanliness of fresh paint, these little rooms form the resort, in summer and autumn evenings, of the owners and their families, who, according to sex and age, indulge themselves with pipes and beer, tea and gossip, or in observing the passengers along the high road,-while these, in their turn, are amused with the amiable and pithy mottoes on the pavilions, which set forth the Pleasure and Ease,' 'Friendship and Sociability,' &c. &c. of the family-party within.

We have thought it necessary to give a slight sketch of the principal continental styles, before we entered upon the consideration of that which is universally recognised as appropriate to the English garden. In a former number of our Review a history of the changes that have passed over English gardens was given, in his usual happy manner, by Sir Walter Scott, which precludes the necessity of more than a passing reference to the same subject. London and Wise were among the earliest innovators on the old Dutch school in England, and received the high praise of Addison in the Spectator' for the introduction of a more natural manner in Kensington Gardens, then newly laid out. Bridgeman followed, laying the axe to the root of many a verdurous peacock and lion of Lincoln-green. Kent, the inventor of the Ha-ha, broke through the visible and formal boundary, and confounded the distinction

6

See Pliny and Martial-we may say passim.

between

between the garden and the park. Brown, of capability' memory, succeeded, with his round clumps, boundary belts, semi-natural rivers, extensive lakes, broad green drives, with the everlasting portico summer-house at the end. Castle Howard, Blenheim, and Stowe, were the great achievements of these times; while the bard of the Leasowes was creating his sentimental farm, rearing,' says D'Israeli, hazels and hawthorns, opening vistas, and winding waters,'

'And, having shown them where to stray,

Threw little pebbles in their way;'

displaying according to the English rhymes of a noble foreigner who raised a plain stone' to the memory of Shenstone'—' a mind natural,' in laying out Arcadian greens rural.' *

Whateley's book completed the revolution. It was instantly translated into French, the Anglomanie' being then at its height; and though the clipped pyramids and hedges did not fall so recklessly as in England, yet no place of any pretension was considered perfect without the addition of its jardin Anglais.'t The natural style was now for some time, in writings and practice, completely triumphant. At length came out Price on the Picturesque,' who once more drew the distinction between the parterre and the forest, in opposition to the straggling, scrambling style, which Whateley called combining the excellences of the garden and the park.'

From the times of Socrates and Epicurus to those of Wesley, Simeon, and Pusey the same story is to be told; and if theology and philosophy could not escape, how should poor gardening expect to go free? It is the natural effect of the bold enunciation of a broad principle, that it will oftener be strained to cover extreme cases than be applied to the general bearing of the subject.

* Dr. Johnson, who, we think, used to boast either that he did or did not (and it is much the same) know a cabbage from a cabbage-rose, has a passage in his 'Life of Shenstone' so perfectly Johnsonian that we must transcribe it:-Now was excited his delight in rural pleasures, and his ambition of rural elegance; he began from this time to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful-a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers. Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves, and to place a bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view-to make water run where it will be heard, and to stagnate where it will be seen-to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden-demand any great powers of the mind, I will not inquire: perhaps a surly and sullen spectator may think such performances rather the sport than the business of human reason. But it must at least be confessed that to embellish the form of nature is an innocent amusement, and some praise must be allowed by the most scrupulous observer to him who does best what multitudes are contending to do well.' + Horace Walpole's description of M. Boutin's garden.

Withdraw

Withdraw the pure and intelligent mind that first directed its application, and hundreds of professed disciples and petty imitators spring up, whose optics are sharp-sighted enough to see the faults condemned in the old system, though their comprehension is too limited to embrace the whole range of truth and beauty in the new; with just so much knowledge as to call up a maxim or phrase for the purpose of distorting it, and passing it on the world as the ipse dixit of the master, though without intellect enough to perceive the time, the measure, or the place, which alone make its application desirable. Wilkes was at much trouble to assure George III. that he was not a Wilkite; and if many an ordinary man has need at times to exclaim, Preserve me from my friends,' all great ones have much more reason to cry out, Defend me from my disciples.' Perhaps all this is a little too grandiloquent for our humble subject; but if a marked example of discipular ultraism and perversion were wanting, no stronger one could be found than that supplied by the followers of Price. And if we have made more of this matter than it deserves, we care not, for our great object is to impress upon our readers that this unfortunate word picturesque' has been the ruin of our gardens. Price himself never dreamt of applying it, in its present usage, to the plot of ground immediately surrounding the house. His own words are all along in favour of a formal and artificial character there, in keeping with the mansion itself; and, as Sir Walter Scott remarks, he expresses in a tone of exquisite feeling his regret at his own destruction of a garden on the old system. He might, indeed, have used the term with reference to those splendid terraces, arcades, and balconies of Italy with which we are familiar in the architectural pictures of Panini; but he would have shrunk with horror to have his theory applied to justify the substitution of tadpole, and leech, and comma, and sausage figures for the trim gardens of symmetrical forms, even though he might see in them (as Addison says) the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush.'

Scott very justly finds fault with the term landscape gardening,' which is another that has proved fatal to our parterres. If such a word as 'landscaping' be inadmissible, it is high time to find some phrase which will express the laying out of park scenery, as completely distinct from 'gardening' as the things themselves

are.

Though it may be questioned whether a picture should be the ultimate test of the taste in laying out gardens and grounds, Price, even on this view, offers some very ingenious arguments in defence not only of Italian but even of the old English garden; and his feelings now would evidently have led him still further to adopt

the

the formal system, had his theory not stood a little in the way. He seems to recognise a threefold division of the domain-the architectural terrace, and flower-garden in direct connection with the house, where he admits the formal style; the shrubbery or pleasure-ground, a transition between the flowers and the trees, which he would hand over to the natural style' of Brown and his school; and, thirdly, the park, which he considers the proper domain of his own system. This is a distinction which it would be well for every proprietor to keep in view, not for the sake of a monotonous adherence to its divisions in every case, but in order to remember that the tree, the shrub, and the flower, though they may be occasionally mingled with effect, yet require a separate treatment, and the application of distinct principles, where they are to be exhibited each in its full perfection. Our present subject of complaint is the encroachments which the natural and picturesque styles have made upon the regular flowergarden. Manufacturers of bye-lanes and lightning-struck cottages are all very well in their own department, but that must not be in the vicinity of the house. We suppose that even Whateley himself would admit that the steps and threshold of the door must be symmetrical, and would probably allow a straight pathway more appropriate, and even more natural, than a winding one, leading directly to the door of the house. Once get a single straight line, even the outline of the building itself, and it then becomes merely a matter of situation, or convenience, or taste, how far the straight lines and right angles shall be extended; and though nature must needs be removed a few paces further into her own proper retreat, yet simplicity may still remain in regular and symmetrical forms, as much as in undulations and irregularities and mole-hills under the very windows of the drawing-room. Nothing, as Scott has remarked, is more completely the child of art than a garden. It is, indeed, in our modern sense of the term, one of the last refinements of civilised life. A man shall ever see,' says Lord Bacon, that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely.' To attempt, therefore, to disguise wholly its artificial character is as great folly as if men were to make their houses resemble as much as possible the rudeness of a natural cavern. So much mawkish sentimentality had been talked about the natural style, that even Price himself dared not assert that a garden must be avowedly artificial. And though now it seems nothing strange to hazard such a remark, yet its truth still requires to be brought more boldly and closely home to us before we can expect to see our gardens what they ought to be.