232 THE GARDENS AT BRAMHAM PARK 



FIG. 158. In the Gardens of Wrest, Bedfordshire. 



of their character to the taste and judgment of Lord Chatham, 

 are perhaps the best examples of lay outs which are not so much 

 gardens, as a collection of landscape pictures to which interest 

 was imparted by the introduction of classic buildings, and from 

 which symmetry and formality were excluded. 



In contrast to the free treatment at Stowe, which brought 

 a tract of countryside into the curtilage of the house, is the 

 formality at Bramham Park, some ten miles from Leeds, which 

 carried the ordered symmetry of the house into the gardens. 

 Of the two methods, the formal was the earlier, but during the 

 eighteenth century it gradually gave way to the other. 



The gardens at Bramham are among the most satisfactory 

 of the large lay outs of the period (Figs. 162, 163). They were 

 devised for Robert Benson, afterwards Lord Bingley, about the 

 year I7IO. 1 There are the usual vistas converging upon the 

 house ; there are various buildings in imitation of the antique, 

 both classic and Gothic ; there are memorials to pet animals ; 

 but the number is reasonable, and the scheme is more easily 

 grasped than that of Stowe. The principal walk runs parallel 

 to the garden front of the house, near which it ends against a 



1 "Vitruvius Britannicus," ii., pi. 81, 82. 



