sending his gardener (Rose) to France, in order to make himself thoroughly acquainted with all the beauties of that Royal garden. The period of William and Mary's reign was remarkable for no great deviation from this style, except perhaps in substituting partially the Dutch formalities-such as iron trelli's-work, clipped yews, and a greater profusion of verdant sculpture. Embroidered parterres and vegetable sculpture are said indeed to have arrived at their highest perfection in this period, or towards the year 1700; and we may get a good notion of the subjects most in vogue, by an extract from Pope's keen satire, written as late as 1713 (in the early part of Anne's reign), when it was beginning to get into disrepute. INVENTORY of a Virtuoso GARDENER. Adam and Eve in yew; Adam, a little shattered by the fall of the tree of knowledge in the great storm; Eve and the serpent, very flourishing. Noah's ark in Holly; the ribs a little damaged for want of water. The tower of Babel, not yet finished. St. George, in box; his arm scarce long enough, but will be in a condition to stick the dragon by next April. Edward the Black Prince, in cypress. A pair of giants stunted, to be sold cheap. An old maid of honor, in wormwood. A topping Ben Jonson, in laurel. Divers eminent modern poets, in bays; somewhat blighted. A quick set hog, shot up into a porcupine, by being forgot a week in rainy weather. A lavender pig, with sage growing in his belly. Whatever may have been the absurdities of the ancient style, it is not to be denied that in connexion with highly decorated architecture, its effect, when in the best tasteas the Italian-is not only splendid and striking, but highly suitable and appropriate. Sir Walter Scott, in an essay on landscape embellishment, says, "if we approve of Palladian architecture, the vases and balustrades of Vitruvius, the enriched entablatures and superb stairs of the Italian school of gardening, we must not, on this account, be construed as vindicating the paltry imitations of the Dutch, who clipped yews into monsters of every species, and relieved them with painted wooden figures. The distinction between the Italian and Dutch is obvious. A stone hewn into a gracefully ornamented vase or urn, has a value which it did not before possess: a yew hedge clipped into a fortification, is only defaced. The one is a production of art, the other a distortion of nature." It must not be forgotten that, during all this period, or nearly six centuries, parks were common in England. Henry I. (1100 to 1135) had a park at Woodstock, and four centuries later, or during the reign of Henry VII., Holinshed informs us, that large parks or inclosed forest portions, several miles in circumference, were so common, that their number in Kent and Essex alone amounted to upwards of a hundred. Although these parks were more devoted to the preservation of game and the pleasures of the chase than to any other purpose, their existence was, we conceive, not wholly owing to this cause; but we look upon them as indicating that love of nature and that desire to retain beautiful portions of it as part of a residence, which form the groundwork of the taste for the modern or landscape gardening, since the latter is only an epitome of nature with the charms judiciously heightened by art. THE MODERN STYLE. Down to the time of Addison, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the formal style reigned triumphant. The gardener, the architect, and the sculptor-all lovers of regularity and symmetry, had retained complete mastery of its arrangements. And it is worthy of more than a passing remark, that when the change in taste did take place, it emanated from the poet, the painter, and the tasteful scholar, rather than from the practical man. In the poetical imagination, indeed, the ideal type of a modern landscape garden seems always to have been more or less shadowed forth. The Vaucluse of Petrarch, Tasso's garden of Armida, the vale of Tempe of Ælian, were all exquisite conceptions of the modern style. And Milton, surrounded as he was by the splendid formalities of the gardens of his time, copied from no existing models, but feeling that EDEN must have been free and majestic in its outlines, he drew from his inner sense of the beautiful, and from nature as he saw her developed in the works of the Creator. There, the crisped brooks,— "With mazy error under pendant shades Both where the morning sun first warmly smote The open field, and where the unpierced shade A happy rural seat of various view.” But it required more than poetical types to change the long rooted fashion. The lever of satire needed to be applied, and the golden links that bind Nature and Art, more clearly revealed, before the old system could be made to waver. The glory and merit of the total revolution which about this time took place in the public taste, belong, it is gene rally conceded, mainly to Addison and Pope. In 1712 appeared Addison's papers on Imagination, considered with reference to the works of Nature and Art. With a delicate and masterly hand, at a time when he possessed, through the “Spectator,” the ear of all refined and tasteful England, he lifted the veil between the garden and natural charms, and showed how beautiful were their relationshow soon the imagination wearies with the stiffness of the former, and how much grace may be caught from a freer imitation of the swelling wood and hill. The next year Pope, who was both a poet and painter, opened his quiver of satire in the celebrated article on verdant sculpture in the Guardian, where he ridiculed with no sparing hand the sheared alleys, formal groves, and "Statues growing that noble place in, Pope was a refined and skilful amateur, and his garden at Twickenham became a celebrated miniature type of the natural school. In his Epistle to Lord Burlington, he developed sound principles for the new art;-the study of nature; the genius of the place; and never to lose sight of good sense; the latter, a rule which the whimsical follies of that day in gardening, seemed, doubtless, to render especially necessary, but which the discordant abortions of am bitious, would-be men of taste, prove is one soonest violated in every succeeding age. The change in the popular feeling thus created, soon gave rise to innovations in the practical art. Bridgeman, the fashionable garden artist of the time, struck, as Horace Walpole thinks, by Pope's criticisms, banished verdant sculpture from his plans, and introduced bits of forest scenery in the gardens at Richmond, And Loudon and Wise, the two noted nurserymen of the day, laid out Kensington gardens anew in a manner so much more natural as to elicit the warm commendations of Addison in the Spectator. It is not too much to say that Kent was the leader of this class. Originally a painter, and the friend of Lord Burlington, he next devoted himself to the subject, and was, undoubtedly, the first professional landscape gardener in the modern style. Previous artists had confined their efforts within the rigid walls of the garden, but Kent, who saw in all nature a garden-landscape, demolished the walls, introduced the ha-ha, and by blending the park and the garden, substituted for the primness of the old inclosure, the freedom of the pleasure-ground. His taste seems to have been partly formed by Pope, and the Twickenham garden was the prototype of those of Carlton House, Kent's chef d'œuvre. And, notwithstanding his faults, "his temples, obelisks, and gazabos of every description in the park, all stuck about in their respective high places," notwithstanding that his passion for natural effects led him into the absurdity of sometimes planting an old dead tree to make the illusion more perfect, we have no hesitation in according to Kent the merit of first fully establishing, in practice, the reform in taste which Addison and Pope had so completely developed in theory. Among the landmarks of the progress of the taste, we must not refuse a passing notice of what seems to have been an unique and beautiful specimen of the new feeling for embellished nature-Leasowes, the "sentimental farm" of Shenstone. From contemporary accounts, it appears to |