THE ''LANDSCAPE-GARDEN:' 99 



a few, and they not wealthy persons ; but in the 

 eighteenth century the taste for planting foreign 

 trees extended itself among rich landed proprietors. 

 A host of amateurs, botanists, and commercial 

 gardeners were busily engaged in enriching the 

 British Arboretum, and the garden-grounds had to 

 be arranged for new effects and a new mode of 

 culture. In Loudon's " Arboretum " (p. 1 26) is a list 

 of the species of foreign trees and shrubs introduced 

 into England up to the year 1830. He calculates 

 that the total number of specimens up to the time 

 that he wrote was about 1400, but the numbers 

 taken by centuries are : in the sixteenth century, 

 89; in the seventeenth century, 131 ; in the eigh- 

 teenth century, 445 ; and in the first three decades 

 of the nineteenth century, 699 ! 



Men stubbed up the old gardens because they 

 had grown tired of their familiar types, as they tire 

 of other familiar things. The eighteenth century 

 was essentially a critical age, an age of enquiry, and 

 gardening, along with art, morals, and religion, came 

 in for its share of coffee-house discussion, and elabor- 

 ate essay-writing, and nothing was considered satis- 

 factory. As to gardening, it was not natural enough 

 for the critics. The works of Salvator and Poussin 

 had pictured the grand and terrible in scenery, 

 Thomson was writing naturalistic poetry, Rousseau 

 naturalistic prose. Garden-ornament was too clas- 

 sical and formal for the varnished litterateur of the 

 Spectator and the Guardian — too symmetrical for 

 the jingling rhymester of a sing-song generation — 



G 2 



