HISTORICAL EPILOGUE 393 



Hogarth's ' Line of Beauty ' was at first substituted for that 

 of the Builders and Architects — later on, however, the curves 

 became less manageable, and finally zig-zagged to such a degree, 

 that a witty Frenchman, following a hint from George Mason's 

 Essay, suggested that in order to design an English or Natural 

 Garden all that was requisite was to intoxicate your gardener and 

 follow his footsteps. 



To supplement the Gospel of ' Nature,' Samuel Richardson, 

 Jean Jaques Rousseau ^ and others had invented the Epistle of 

 Sentiment or Sensibility, and so the Landscape Garden besides 

 writhing and meandering in imitation of so-called Nature had also 

 to display feeling, emotion, and sympathy with the varying moods 

 and fluctuating passions of Humanity. 



Lord Kames about the middle of the i8th Century wrote : * the 

 most perfect idea of a garden requires the several parts to be 

 arranged so as to inspire all the different emotions that can be 

 raised by gardening.' 



Of this Emotional or Sentimental Garden — this ' Jardin Lar- 

 moyant ' as the genre may be called — the poet Shenstone was the 

 most successful exponent in England, by his creation of ' the 

 Leasowes ' in Shropshire ; where by means of vines, weeping 

 willows, urns, trophies, garlands, columns, mottos and inscriptions 

 he sought to ' raise emotions ' appropiate to the peculiar character 

 of the ground, whether grand, savage, melancholy, horrid or 

 beautiful, and to caress and cherish the corresponding human 

 sentiments. For all Goldsmith's good-natured banter and John- 

 son's sarcasm, so good a judge as George Mason thought that ' of 

 all the amateur and professional gardeners of the day the most 

 intimate alliance with Nature was formed by Shenstone ' — and 

 his ' Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening ' are still agreeable 

 desultory reading.^ 



^ Rousseau made the dawn visible to people who had never risen till noon, 

 the landscape to eyes that had only rested hitherto upon drawing-rooms and 

 palaces, the natural garden to men who had only walked between tonsured 

 yews and rectilinear flower-borders.'— Taine, ' L'ancien Regime.' 



- See ante pp. 167-169. 



