398 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



grandeur — small valleys, woods overhanging them and rivers with 

 steep banks form a romantic disposition : grounds gently falling 

 and rising with fine verdure suggest cheerfulness, creating little 

 or no sentiment. But the quotation above ^ gives sufficient 

 idea of Whately's principles. His views on the formal garden 

 are, that in a situation of a dead flat, art is called in to aid 

 nature, by means of bosquets, statues, vases, trees cut into arches, 

 cascades, basins, temples, vistas and plantations, mounts and 

 buildings of all kinds : the imagination having no scope, play 

 must be given to the senses and flowers should be planted in 

 beds and parterres. 



After the peace of 1762 the English style of gardening passed 

 into France and the ideas of the new school were perhaps even 

 more successfully applied by that most susceptible nation. It has 

 even been asserted that Dufresny was the founder of the school, 

 and certainly the Abbe Delille's poem ' Les Jardins ' both for 

 matter and manner far surpasses its English rival by William 

 Mason.- But practice is better than precept, and the example given 

 by the Marquis de Girardin ^ at Ermenonville, near Paris, laid out 

 under his own eye by N. Morel and the landscape-painter G. F. 

 Meyer, exercised a wider influence than his description of it 

 published in 1777. In this he writes very modestly of the dis- 

 covery of his own mistakes as the result of experience in ' com- 

 posing ' the landscape. He began under the impression that all 

 that was necessary was to substitute curves for straight lines and 

 replace a rectangular garden by a winding one. He thought he 

 could produce variety in a small space by 'clapping the uni- 

 verse between walls ' ; but admits that he confounded simplicity 

 with letting loose Nature, and found he was only exchanging 

 Nature mutilated and circumscribed for Nature vague and 

 cofifused. 



The most famous features of Ermenonville were a desert, a 

 lake, a cascade, a grotto, and the Isle of Poplars where Rousseau 

 was first buried, having died in the ' Philosopher's Cottage.' Besides 



^ See ante pp. 194-8. - See ajite pp. 182-3 and 206-8. 



* See ante pp. 202 and 209-10. 



