HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 57 



characteristic of the English garden is derived from 

 and gets its impulse from the prevailing influence 

 of Nature at home. It has the characteristics of 

 the country. 



It is, I know, commonly held now-a-days that 

 the taste for landscape is wholly of modern growth. 

 So far as England is concerned it came in, they say, 

 with Thomson in poetry, and with Brown in gardens. 

 So far as relates to the conscious relish for Nature, so 

 far as relates to the love of Nature as a mirror of 

 the moods of the mind, or as a refuge from man, this 

 assertion may be true enough. Yet, surely the 

 conscious delight in landscape must have been pre- 

 ceded by an unconscious sympathy this way : it 

 could not have sprung without generation. Artistic 

 sight is based upon instinct, feeling, perceptions that 

 reach one knows not how far back in time, it does 

 not come by magic. 



See also what a rude, slatternly affair this much- 

 lauded landscape-garden of the "immortal Brown" 

 was ! Here are two sorts of gardens the tra- 

 ditional garden according to Bacon, the garden 

 according to Brown. Both are Nature, but the first 

 is Nature in an ideal dress, the second is Nature 

 with no dress at all. The first is a garden for a 

 civilised man, the second is a garden for a gipsy. 

 The first is a picture painted from a cherished model, 

 the second is a photograph of the same model 

 undressed. Brown's work, in fact, represents the 

 garden's return to its original barbaric self the re- 

 inauguration of the elemental. Let it not be said, 



