HISTORICAL NOTICES. 31 



on landscape embellishment, says, "if we approve of Pal- 

 laJian architecture, the vases and balustrades of Vitruvius. 

 the enriched entablatures and superb stairs of the Italian 

 school of gardening, we must not, on this account, be con- 

 strued as vindicating the paltry imitations of the Dutch, 

 who clipped yews into monsters of every species, and re- 

 lieved them with painted wooden figures. The distinction 

 between the Italian and Dutch is obvious. A stone hewn 

 into a gracefully ornamented vase or urn, has a value 

 which it did not before possess : a yew hedge clipped into 

 a fortification, is only defaced. The one is a production of 

 art, the other a distortion of nature." 



It must not be forgotten that, during all this period, or 

 nearly six centuries, parks were common in England. 

 Henry I. (1100 to 1135) had a park at Woodstock, and 

 four centuries later, or during the reign of Henry VII., 

 Holinshed informs us, that large parks or inclosed forest 

 portions, several miles in circumference, were so common, 

 that their number in Kent and Essex alone amounted to 

 upwards of a hundred. 



Although these parks were more devoted to the preser- 

 vation of game and the pleasures of the chase than to any 

 other purpose, their existence was, we conceive, not wholly 

 owing to this cause ; but we look upon them as indicating 

 that love of nature and that desire to retain beautiful por- 

 tions of it as part of a residence, which form the ground- 

 work of the taste for the modern or landscape gardening, 

 since the latter is only an epitome of nature with the 

 charms judiciously heightened by art. 



The Modern Style. Down to the time of Addison, 

 in the beginning jf the eighteenth century, the formal style 

 reigned triumi)hant. The gardener, the architect, and the 



