ARRANGEMENT. II3 



around our palaces, castles, and other stately homes. For 

 these it forms a beautiful floor and fringe. It prevents too 

 sudden a transition from architecture to horticulture.* With 

 the pleasure-grounds around opening upon the park, and 

 with the general landscape in the distance beyond, the 

 amalgamation of art and nature is excellent. Nor do I 

 deny for a moment that in all gardens, if introduced in 

 modest and due proportion, it is the most becoming frame- 

 work for our summer flowers ; but my complaint is, that 

 this giant Geometry has taken possession of our small 

 gardens not as an ally, but as an autocrat — ejecting old 

 tenants and dismissing old servants, like some heartless 

 conceited heir, extruding them disdainfully, as the usurping 

 cuckoo thrusts the eggs from a sparrow's nest. Just as that 

 sensational system of gardening, which goes by the name of 

 " Bedding-Out," has expelled in so many instances our 

 beautiful herbaceous plants and our lovely flowering shrubs, 

 so the geometrical style has destroyed too frequently a 



* "His" (Sir C. Barry's) "idea was, that the definite artificial lines of a 

 building should not be contrasted, but harmonised, with the free and careless 

 grace of natural beauty. This could only be effected by a scheme of architec- 

 tural gardens, graduated, as it were, from regular formality in the immediate 

 neighbourhood of the building itself, through shrubberies and plantations, less 

 and less artificial, till they seemed to melt away in the unstudied simplicity 

 of the park or wood without." — Meuioir of Sir C. Bar?y, by his Son, p. 113. 



H 



