all his love for the formal garden, Temple is modern enough to admit that there may be other forms, wholly irregular, that may have more beauty than any of the others, but they must owe it to some extraordinary dispositions of Nature in the seat, or some great race of fancy or judgment in the contrivance.' Fifty years after Temple's mention of the Chinese Gardens 'as too hard of achievement,' they were being universally copied in England and the Continent. Our next view is Stowe in Buckinghamshire, showing the Great Parterre from the Portico, as laid out by Bridgman for Lord Cobham about 1714. Bridgman banished verdant sculpture from his garden, but still retained green architecture (observe the arches), straight alleys and palissades and began to introduce ‘a little gentle disorder into the plantation of his trees and bushes.' The whole garden became a sort of practical pun upon the name of its owner, Lord Temple, who seems to have had temples on the brain, and dedicated them to every possible Deity and Virtue. Stowe almost epitomises the early history of Landscape Gardening, for Kent succeeded Bridgman as its 'Improver,' and 'Capability' Brown began his career here in the humble post of kitchen gardener. Pope held up Stowe as an ideal almost unattainable, crying in ecstacy : 'Time shall make it grow, A thing to wonder at, perhaps a "Stowe "!' The name of Pope brings us to the borderland dividing the old garden from the new, as Pope's own verse may be said to be 1 The following books on the Dutch Garden mav be consulted :— Beudeker's Germania Inferior' (British Museum). Crispin de Pass Hortus Floridus.' Van der Groen Le Jardinier des Pays Bas,' 1672. 'Belgic or Netherlandish Hesperides,' 1683. A Rademaker, Holland's Arcadia' 1730. John Ray Observations on a Journey through the Low Countries,'-1673. 2 Horace Walpole. the turning-point in literature. By his famous Number 173 of the 'Guardian' ridiculing the absurdities and excesses of 'verdant sculpture' and the cut-box system, and putting up for sale 'Adam and Eve in yew-Adam a little shaken by the fall of the Tree of Knowledge,' - by his Epistle to Lord Burlington on the Aesthetic of Gardening, and by his own example in his villa at Twickenham where he and his gardener, John Serle, planned the wonderful grotto he describes in his letters, the echo of which has alone survived, Pope is undoubtedly one of the pioneers of modern gardening. A plan is here given of the garden of five acres (never before had so small a compass produced such a revolutionary effect upon gardening!) as left at the Poet's death in 1744, by his gardener, John Serle. Thereon appears the Shell Temple, the large Mount, the two small Mounts, the Vineyard, the Obelisk in memory of his mother, the Grove, the Orangery and the Underground Passage leading to the Grotto. We have also fourteen years later from the pen of Horace Walpole, a description of it when the property of Sir William Stanhope. Would you believe it, he has cut down the sacred groves themselves! In short, it was a little bit of ground of 5 acres, inclosed with three lanes and seeing nothing. Pope has twisted and twirled and rhymed and harmonised this till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening beyond one another, and the whole surrounded with thick impenetrable woods. Sir William, by advice of his son-in-law, Mr Ellis, has hacked and hewed these groves, wriggled a winding-gravel walk through them with an edging of shrubs, in what they call the modern taste, and, in short, has desired the three lanes to walk in again—and now is forced to shut them out again by a wall, for there was not a Muse could walk there but she was spied by every country fellow that went by with a pipe in his mouth.'1 Pope divides the literary honours of his generation with Addison who, humorist himself, in his equally famous 'Spectator' on the 'Pleasures of a Garden,' declared Nature should be humoured, instead of being coerced. 1 Letter to Sir Horace Mann, June 20th, 1760. |