HIS'IORICAL NOTICES. 35 



have been originally a giazing farm, from which, by taste- 

 ful arrangement and planting, and pretty walks, seats, root- 

 house, urns, and appropriate inscriptions, the poet created a 

 scene of much pastoral and poetical beauty. 



The modern style was now running high in popular 

 favor in England, but the next professor of the art. Brown, 

 who seems to have been a mannerist not without some sym- 

 pathy with nature, but not capable of grasping her more 

 varied and expressive beauties, " Capability" Brown, as he 

 was nicknamed, saw in every new place great capabilities, 

 but unfortunately his own mind seems to have furnished 

 but one model — a round lake, a smooth bare lawn, a clump 

 of trees and a boundary belt — ^which he expanded, with few 

 variations, to suit the compass of an estate of a thousand 

 acres, or a cottasre with a few roods. His works were often 

 on a srand scale, and he boasted that the Thames would 

 never forgive him for the rival he had created in the arti- 

 ficial lake at Blenheim. " The places he altered," says 

 Loudon, " are beyond all reckoning. Improvement was the 

 fashion of the time ; and there was scarcely a country gen- 

 tleman who did not, on some occasion or other, consult the 

 gardening idol of the day." Mason, the poet, praises this 

 artist, and Horace Walpole apologizes for not praising him. 

 Daines Barrington says, "Kent hath been succeeded by 

 Brown, who hath undoubtedly great merit in laying out 

 pleasure grounds ; but I conceive, that, in some of his plans, 

 I see traces rather of the kitchen gardener of old Stowe, 

 than of Poussin, or Claude Lorraine." 



This mannerism gave rise finally, to the celebrated work 

 On the Picturesque by Sir Uvedale Price, who, in a series 

 of elegant and masterly essays, pointed out the fiults and 

 follies of this Brown and his imitators, analysed the beau- 



