and grottos; trees clipped and tortured into every variety of shape, to force a resemblance to all things animate or inanimate-men, birds, beasts, and in one instance, a wren's nest capable of containing a man; these were the general features of garden scenery, which prevailed with progressive increase in their cumbrous and unnatural character, from the time of Henry VIII., to the middle of the last century.

The very nomenclature of the art, as recorded in the memoirs of Evelyn, would be sufficient to terrify an artist gardener of modern times. An Eden of Evelyn's invention for the amusement of royal leisure, comprehended “knots, traylework, parterres, compartments, borders, banks, and embossments; labyrinths, dædals, cabinets, cradles, close walks, galleries, pavillions, porticoes, lanthorns, and other relievos of topiary and horticular architecture; fountaines, jettes, cascades, pisceries, rocks, grottoes, cryptæ; mounts, precipices, and ventiducts; gazon theatres, artificial echoes, automate and hydraulic music." The upper garden at Kensington was long known by the name of the " Siege of Troy;" from the circumstance of the shrubs and trees having been taught to imitate the lines, angles, bastions, scarps, and counterscarps of regular fortifications; to please William III., whose ideas were all military. This very

garden was eulogised by Addison in the 477th No. of the Spectator, though in a previous number he had pointed out a better way: surely in the latter number, sacrificing correct taste to courtly adulation.

Many ingenious theories have been propounded, to account for this extraordinary counter movement against the simple as well as beautiful examples offered by nature; the most plausible of which shall be noticed. Pride and a desire of privacy having enclosed with walls the demesnes of royal and noble persons; pomp and solitude combined to call for something that might enrich and enliven the insipid and

unanimated partition. Walpole, to whose Essay on Modern Gardening, I am chiefly indebted for the materials of this section, mentions as not an uncommon instance, that after the circumjacent country had been shut out, attempts were made to recover it, by raising large mounds of earth to peep over the walls of the garden. It should also be remembered, that the gardener was a very subordinate person; scarcely above the condition of a common labourer, even in royal gardens. The architect of the castle, palace, or mansion, was also the designer of the gardens, and viewed every thing through an architectural medium: and it may be observed, that till the discovery of, and our extensive intercourse with, the new world, the indigenous plants and trees of this country afforded so little variety, as scarcely to call forth the exercise of gardening as a science. By this latter observation it is not intended to defend the heavy, formal style of gardening, which formerly prevailed; but to show that gardening, as an art, did not offer the inducements to its cultivation, which the desire of perpetuating foreign plants in this country afterwards did. It thus happened, that nature was subjected to the rule and compasses of the architect.

The dawn of a better taste is discerned in the Essays on Gardens by Lord Bacon; who, though he wished to retain shorn trees and hedges, proposed winter or evergreen gardens, and rude or neglected spots as specimens of wild nature. "As for the making of knots or figures," says he, "with divers coloured earths, they be but toys. I do not like images cut out in juniper, or other garden stuff, they are for children." Milton, in his description of the garden of Eden, paints a landscape wholly different from the models of his time; when he describes the crisped brooks running with mazy error under pendant shades:

-"Visiting each plant, and fed

Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice art
In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon
Poured forth profuse, on hill, and dale, and plain;
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierced shade.
Imbrowned the noon tide bowers. Thus was this place

A happy rural seat of various views."

But neither the philosopher nor the poet were successful in reforming the national taste of their own generation: though it is probable, that their hints towards the formation of a better taste, were not lost upon another age. After the restoration of Charles II., the principal change effected, through, be it observed, the influence of French example, was planting avenues in the royal parks, and radiations diverging from a centre, in an open champagne: and this plan had many to adopt it among the nobility, for it was the subjection of a whole district of country to one grand mansion. An extensive portion of Grimsthorpe Park, in Lincolnshire, presents something of an arrangement of this kind. The reigns of William and Anne were distinguished by the peculiarities of what is called the Dutch taste in gardening. Large inclosures of wrought iron, with lofty gates of richly ornamented patterns, which were placed at the end of avenues leading to the mansion; hydraulic works, fountains, and waterfalls, of some magnitude and enormous cost, were the principal features of this style. The heavy expense of the first formation of these latter, and the constant demand for supporting them in perfection; combined with a conviction of the puerile fancy by which waterworks were contrived to wet the unwary, not to refresh the spectator, were among the causes of the almost universal decay into which they have fallen. The waterworks at Chatsworth, made by Monsieur Grillett, in 1694, are the only examples remaining in any state of perfection. No exem

plification of any material change of taste occurs, from this period, till the reign of George II.; when, under the patronage of Queen Caroline, Bridgeman had an opportunity of displaying a more chaste style than any of his predecessors. He banished vegetable sculpture, and introduced wild scenes and cultivated fields in Richmond Park; but he still clipt his alleys, though he left to their natural growth the central parts of the masses, through which they were pierced. The boldest innovation, however, upon ancient style, was effected after 1716, on a small scale, by Pope, at Twickenham. This garden, of whose beautiful features nothing now remains, is said to have furnished Kent, (a painter, an architect, and, by Walpole considered, the father of modern gardening,) with a model for those he laid out at Carlton House. The villas at Chiswick, Esher, and Claremont, are cited as the best works of this artist.

A new application of Kent's style, comprehending the grounds destined to agriculture, by including them in the whole scheme, and imperceptibly connecting them with the more embellished portion, was first successfully practised by Mr. Phillip Southcote, at Wobourne Farm, in Surrey. Hence the origin of that description of pleasure ground, which has since received the French designation of ferme ornée. The most beautiful exemplification of this style was the Leasowes of Shenstone.

Wright, on a limited scale, succeeded as the director of public taste. But Launcelot Brown, who, from using the word "capability" so invariably in his consultations, had this term applied to him, as a ridiculous distinction from others of the name, possessed the supreme control over the art of modern gardening, during the course of nearly half a century. His self complacency was so great, that on the formation of an artificial river, in a valley at Blenheim, he exultingly said, that "the Thames would never forgive

him." He is described as a consummate mannerist; but his reputation and wealth gave him almost exclusive pretensions. Clumps and belts were multiplied to a disgusting monotony, and abounded in every part of the kingdom. The ancient avenues disappeared, as if before the wand of a magician; every vestige of the formal or reformed taste, was forcibly removed. Whatever approached to a right line was held in abhorrence.

Considerable, opposition was manifested in a controversial form, to the influence of Brown on public opinion; in which Mr., afterwards Sir William Chambers, distinguished himself, as the advocate of the Chinese style of gardening ; and Price as the powerful supporter of a style, the basis of which is described in the title of his work-"Essays on the Picturesque, as compared with the sublime and beautiful, and on the use of studying pictures for the purpose of improving real landscape." Good taste has almost universally banished the once prevalent Chinese style. Pagodas, and Chinese bridges, and other garden decorations of a semibarbarous nation, were too ungenial to our soil, and alien from all our preconceived notions of the sublime and beautiful, to retain any very extended hold on public opinion. On the other hand, the principle of Price, followed out in the manner which the author intended, materially influenced the national taste. His real object was, not to induce the noble and wealthy to create landscape gardening from pictures, but by a reference to the taste of the most distinguished landscape painters to shew, that nature ought to be the model in both instances.

By slow degrees the soundness of this principle became generally recognised: and was effectively adopted by a gentleman of the name of Repton, who, from being an amateur, began his career as professor of landscape gardening, in the latter part of the last century. In the early part