2o6 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



choice. — {To his step-mother^ May 'i^rd, 1786.) Private Letters of 

 Edward Gibbon^ i753-i794 {edited by Rowland E. Brother 6). 



L'ABB^ Called ^ VAbbi Virgile^ by Rivarol, from his 7-endering of the Georgics in 



DELILLE 1769; translated "■ Paradise Lost, ^ in London, and like Milton lost his sight. 

 (i73o*i°l3)- Author of^Vhomme des Cha??ips ' a?id ' La Conversation.' 



pAPIN has sung Gardens of the regular style, and the 

 ^^ monotony attached to the great regularity has passed 

 from the subject into the poem. The imagination, naturally a 

 friend to liberty, here walks painfully in the involved design of 

 a parterre, anon expires at the end of a long straight alley. Every- 

 where it regrets the slightly disordered beauty and the piquant 

 irregularity of nature. Finally he has only treated the mechanical 

 part of the art of gardening ; he has entirely forgotten the most 

 essential part, which seeks in our sensations, in our feeling, the 

 source of the pleasures, which country scenes and the beauties 

 of nature perfected by art occasion us. In a word, his gardens 

 are those of the architect ; the others are those of the philosopher, 

 the painter, the poet. 



This style has gained much in the last few years ; and if this 

 is but the effect of fashion, we ought to be grateful to it. The 

 art of gardens, which might be called the luxury of agriculture, 

 appears to me one of the most suitable, I might almost say, one 

 of the most virtuous amusements of rich people. . . . 



When Rapin wrote a Latin poem on regular gardens, it was 

 easy for him to present in the four Cantos which compose it — 

 (i) the flowers, (2) orchards, (3) waters, (4) forests. But in 

 picturesque and free gardens, in which all these objects are 

 often mixed together, where it has been necessary to go back to 

 the philosophic causes of the pleasure, which the sight of Nature, 

 embellished and not tortured by art, gives us ; from which it has 

 been necessary to exclude straight lines, symmetrical distributions, 

 and formal beauties, another plan was necessary. The author has 

 thus shown in the first Canto the art of borrowing from nature 



