32 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



sculptor — all lovers of regularity and symmetry, had re- 

 tained complete mastery of its arrangements. And it is 

 worthy of more than a passing remark, that when the 

 change in taste did take place, it emanated from the poet, 

 the painter, and the tasteful scholar, rather than from the 

 practical man. 



In the poetical imagination, indeed, the ideal type of a 

 modern landscape garden seems always to have been more 

 or less shadowed forth. The Vaucluse of Petrarch, Tasso's 

 garden of Armida, the vale of Tempe of iElian, were all 

 exquisite conceptions of the modern style. And Milton, 

 surrounded as he was by the splendid formalities of the 

 gardens of his time, copied from no existing models, but 

 feeling that Eden must have been free and majestic in its 

 outlines, he drew from his inner sense of the beautiful, and 

 from nature as he saw her developed in the works of the 

 Creator. There, the crisped brooks, — 



" With mazy error under pendant shades 

 Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed 

 Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art 

 In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon 

 Pour'd forth profuse, on hill and dale and plain, 

 Both where the morning sun first warnily smote 

 The open field, and where the unpierced shade 

 Imbrown'd the noontide bowers ; thus was this place 

 A happy rural seat of various view." 



But it required more than poetical types to change the 

 long rooted fashion. The lever of satire needed to be ap- 

 plied, and the golden links that bind Nature and Art, more 

 clearly revealed, before the old system could be made to 

 waver. 



The glory and merit of the total revolution which about 

 this time took place in the public taste, belong, it is gene- 



