THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN: 



119 



ful to one's imagination, fatal to garden-fervour.* 

 And naturally so, for analysis of the processes of 

 garden-craft carried too far begets loss of faith in all. 

 Analysis is a kill-joy, destructive of dreams of beauty. 

 "We murder to dissect." That was a true word of 

 the cynic of that day, who summed up current con- 

 troversy upon gardening in the opinion that " the 

 works of Nature were well executed, but in a bad 

 taste." The quidnuncs' books about gardening are 

 about as much calculated to give one delight, as the 

 music the child gets out of the strings of an instru- 

 ment that it broke for the pride of dissection. Even 

 Addison, with the daintiest sense and prettiest pen 

 of them all, shows how thoroughly gardening had 

 lost 



. . . "its happy, country tone, 



Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note 



Of men contention-tost," 



as he thrums out his laboured coffee-house conceit. 

 " I think there are as many kinds of gardening as 

 poetry ; your makers of parterres and flower- 

 gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this 

 art ; contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages, and 

 cascades, are Romance writers. Wise and Loudon 

 are our heroic poets." Nor is his elaborate argu- 

 ment meant to prove the gross inferiority of Art in a 



* A candid friend thus writes to Repton : " You may have per- 

 ceived that I am rather too much inclined to the Price and Knight 

 party, and yet I own to you that I have been often so much disgusted 

 by the affected and technical language of connoisseurship, that I have 

 been sick of pictures for a month, and almost of Nature, when the 

 same jargon was applied to her." (Repton, p. 232.) 



