308 The History of Longleat. 
to his employers the great capability of their grounds, earned for 
himself the name of Capability Brown. So great a personage de- 
serves a stately introduction: let Cowper marshal him in :— 
‘Lo! he comes: 
The omnipotent magician Brown appears. 
He speaks: the lawn in front becomes a lake; 
Woods vanish! hills subside, and valleys rise; 
And streams—as if created for his use, 
Pursue the track of his directing wand; 
Sinuous or straight, now rapid and now slow, 
Now murmuring soft, now roaring in cascades, 
F’en as he bids. Th’ enraptured owner smiles. 
’Tis finished: and yet, finished as it seems, 
Still wants—a mine to satisfy the cost!” 
Obedient to this magical wand, the Dutch formalities disappeared ; 
plants and trees, released from regimental discipline, were ordered 
to stand at ease, or to take up new positions more agreeable to the 
principles of English liberty. The great difficulty appears to have 
been how to manage the water; the natural stream was by no 
means commensurate with the grandeur of Longleat. I do not 
bestow that epithet on this place without sufficient reason: because 
the impression produced upon most minds, when the whole view of 
this house, gardens and demesne, lies under the eye, surveying it 
from a height, certainly is, that taking it altogether it is the very 
beau ideal of an English baronial residence. John Aubrey (not 
unhappily) calls it “the most august house in England.” The na- 
tural hills and valleys, the great masses of wood with which the 
hills have been clothed, the extensive range of park, the command 
of prospect, and the style of the house itself, produce, altogether, a 
character of grandeur, which is, in this county at least, peculiar to 
Longleat. Mr. Repton justly observes that there is a vast difference 
between the grand and the great. For example—four thousand 
acres with a paling round them and a cotton factory in the centre, 
all in the middle of Salisbury plain, might be great; but nobody 
would think of calling them grand. Greatness of dimension is one 
thing—greatness of character is quite another. The two are often 
confounded ; but though the difference may not, perhaps, be so 
easy to describe, the eye detects it in a moment. Therefore, to 
bring the water forward into proportion with all the other features 
