402 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



Just as the Natural or ' Landscape ' School was a reaction 

 against the extreme formality or symmetry which had preceded 

 it, so the Landscape gardeners in their turn had to fight against 

 the opposition levelled against them by the critical group of 

 what has been called the ' Picturesque ' writers,^ William Gilpin, 

 Uvedale Price and Payne Knight, who steered a sort of middle 

 course between the excesses of both the Formalists and Land- 

 scapists. To them perhaps we owe it that there is a single old- 

 fashioned garden remaining unconverted into a park. Payne 

 Knight in particular was a virulent opponent of Brown and 

 Repton in prose and verse, and was satirically severe upon the 

 desolate mansion standing 



' 'Midst shaven lawns that far around it creep, 

 In one eternal undulating sweep 

 And scattered clumps that nod at one another 

 Each stiffly waving to its formal brother,' 



and he yearns for the moss-grown terraces, the yew and the 

 ancient avenue 'to mark the flat insipid waving plain.' 



So the prophets of ' Nature ' did not finally escape the same 

 charge of artificiality and uniformity brought against their more 

 intentionally ' Formal ' predecessors. 



Price, while strongly advising that the formal garden shall be 

 modified rather than destroyed, thought that the principles of 

 Claude shall be followed as a safe guide. To us, now looking 

 back, it hardly seems that a placid landscape of Claude or the 

 more savage Salvator Rosa lend themselves to imitation or re- 

 production in a garden. Windham, in a letter to Repton, asks 

 very pertinently : Does the pleasure that we receive from the 

 view of Parks and Gardens result from their affording subjects 

 that would appear to advantage in a picture ? and answers : That 

 places are not to be laid out with ' a view to their appearance in 

 a picture, but to their use and the enjoyment of them in real life.' 



At this point we will break off our sketch of English gardens 



1 Besides their writings quoted in the text {ante pp. 212-217), consult 

 'Gilpin's various ' Picturesque Tours' and Payne Knight's 'The Landscape' (a 

 didactic poem) 1794. 



