122 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



PIERRE 1670, appointed Tutor to the Dauphin, andfo7- twenty years published the 

 TTc> Edition of the Classics ^^ in usiim Delphini.''^ 1674, Member of the French 



. r V Academy. 1685, Bishop of Avranches. 



A LTHOUGH natural beauties are preferable to artistic ones, 

 ''*' that is not the taste of this century. Nothing pleases, if 

 not costly. A fountain issuing in great cascades from the foot 

 of a rock, tumbling over a golden sand the clearest and freshest 

 water in the world, will not please the people at court as much 

 as a jet of foetid and muddy water drawn up at enormous cost 

 from a frog-marsh. A factitious parterre, composed of earth 

 brought together according to a plan of Monsieur Le Notre, 

 having for its whole decoration but a few rows of box, which 

 never distinguish the seasons by change of colour; surrounded 

 by vast sanded alleys, very compact and very bare ; such a 

 parterre forms the delight of polite society. 



It leaves to small cits and peasants these rustic lawns, this 

 rural turf. It requires palissades erected with the line, and 

 at the point of the shears. The green shades of these tufted 

 birches, and of those great oaks which were found at the birth 

 of time, are in bad taste and worthy of the grossness of our 

 fathers. Is not to think thus to prefer a painted face to the 

 natural colour of a beautiful countenance ? But the depravity of 

 this judgment is discovered in our pictures and in our tapestries. 

 Paint on the one side a fashionable garden, and on the other 

 one of those beautiful landscapes, in which Nature spreads her 

 riches undisguised; one will present a very tedious object, the 

 other will charm you by its delight. You will be tired of the 

 one at first glance, you will never weary of looking at the other, 

 such is the force of nature to make itself beloved, in spite of 

 the pilferings and deceits of art. — Huetia7ia, '- Natural Beauties 

 preferable to Artistic ojtes ' (1722).^ 



I have no more approval for the gardens in fashion than 

 for iron-screens (clairvoyees). I mean those gardens, composed 



^ Bottiger contends that the Bishop of Avranches has in these remarks 

 foreshadowed the modern landscape garden before the Spectator. 



