XXXVlll. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Je.m Tijou was h/iported by William III. for the 

 wonderful Hampton Court grilles which have, in 

 recent years, been replaced in their original situa- 

 tion. But though their design is French, the 

 craftsmanship is English, Huntingdon Shaw, a 

 Nottingham smith, having undoubtedly hammered 

 them under Tijou's superintendence. The lingering 

 medievalism of Henry's privy garden was then 

 entirely swept away. The triangle, the mount, the 

 water gate, the galleries were removed, a perfect 

 " plat " was obtained, and the elaborately shaped 

 southern end was enclosed by Tijou's c/airvoyee, 

 which admitted of a view of the Thames and the 

 country beyond. Other c/airvoyees were set into 

 the fencing of the great semi-circular Eastern garden 

 at the points where the long avenues and the canal 

 went off from it, so that the eye could range 

 interruptedly from the palace to Kingston. But if 

 the Hampton Court ironwork is not native in its 

 design, there was an abundance, as beautiful if not 

 as intricate, turned out by our own craftsmen on 

 their own initiative, and grilles and gateways became 

 usual in quite small places. We have already 

 noticed a simple example of the clairvoyee at West- 

 bury, and have called attention to the rapidly 

 disappearing ironwork at Enfield, that had belonge.i 

 to the citizens' country houses, as Defoe tells us. 

 But he tells us also of great houses such as Canons, 

 the Duke of Chandos's home, in the same district. 

 Here the revulsion against walls was carried to an 

 extreme, and Defoe, exulting at the novelty, declares 

 that in these " very large and well-disposed gardens 

 the greatest pleisure of all is that the divisions of 

 the whole, being only made by balustrades of iron 

 and not by walls, you see the whole at once, be you 

 in what part of the garden or parterre you will." 

 The forecourt arrangement at Wotton (page 289) and 

 at Drayton (page xix.) are examples ot the same idea. 

 The gateposts and supporting pillars were sometimes 

 also of iron, but more often of stone and of much size 

 and elaboration. The strong likeness between those 

 at Drayton and Wren's famous " Flower-pot " gate at 

 Hampton Court (page x.) clearly appears, but both 

 are, as it were, mere developments of the earlier work 

 of Inigo Jones and Webb at Thorpe (page xviii.). 

 The old-fashioned desire for privacy, its love of 

 seclusion and the mystery of small enclosures had 

 given way to mere ceremonial grandeur, and though 

 the sunk fence did not come into use until formalism 

 was dying away, and therefore the landscapists 

 claimed distant outlook as their invention though 

 Walpole declared that it was Kent who first " leapt 

 the fence," yet we see that the earlier school had 

 solved the problem of the vista by the use 

 of iron, and had included the whole country- 

 side in their comprehensive embrace. The only 

 difference is this, that, whereas the formal school 

 carried their garden into the park, the landscape 

 school introduced the park into the garden and right 

 up to the house windows ; the former extended 

 geometry into distant landscape, the latter brought 

 their modified wilderness and false nature up to the 

 front door. Of the giant efforts of the older mode 

 none ever succeeded in outdoing a comparatively 

 early example. Badminton had been the modest 

 home of a younger branch of the Somersets, and 

 came to the senior branch only after the Civil Wars 

 had laid waste their ancient seats. But the third 

 Marquess of Worcester made it thoroughly ducal 



even before the strawberry leaves and the Beaufort 

 title were granted to him in 1682. When we look 

 at Kip's great plate of the full Badminton lay-out 

 we conclude that here, if anywhere, he allowed his 

 delineating pen to run away with him. Its scale is 

 too small to make it suitable for one of our illus- 

 trations, and it is another plate, showing merely the 

 central portion, that we reproduce (page xxxvii.). In 

 the view we first mentioned, the house, with its 

 ample surrounding of parterres and mazes, clipped 

 alleys and quincunxes, appears as a mere postage 

 stamp in the midst of the far-extending radiations 

 of trees which cover quite a section of the counties 

 of Wilts and Gloucester, and are not complete 

 when the edges of the paper are reached. Yet the 

 description and information given by an eye-witness 

 and visitor before the end of Charles II. 's reign, 

 prove that Kip by no means stretched out the reality. 

 Mr. Justice North, who became Lord Guilford and 

 Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under James II., was at 

 Bristol Assizes in 1680, and afterwards spent some 

 days on a visit at Badminton together with his 

 younger brother Roger, author of the " Lives of the 

 Norths," who, going up on to the roof of the house, 

 tells us how "the lanthorn is in the centre of an 

 asterisk of glades cut through the woods of all the 

 country round, 4 or 5 in a quarter, almost apert tie 

 Yteu. Divers of the gentlemen cut their trees and 

 hedges to humour his vistas ; and some planted their 

 hills in his lines for compliment at their own charge." 

 When such a point had been reached that the 

 geometry of the house and gardens of one of 

 England's mightiest and wealthiest landowners could 

 no longer be contained on his own vast acreage, but 

 had to overflow on to that of his lesser neighbours, 

 formalism had gone too far, for its dignity had 

 become a dreariness, and it had trespassed beyond its 

 proper domain of a transitional region, a buffer state, 

 between the simple rigidity of the house and the 

 intricate curvatures of Nature. And, even in its 

 own domain, cleverness, curiousness and intricacy 

 were asserting themselves at the expense of beauty, 

 harmony and reserve. The knots and parterres had 

 become so fantastic and elaborate that the small and 

 tortured spaces between and among the box pattern- 

 ings were less and less a home for plants, and were 

 more and more filled with coloured sand. The 

 shears were used indiscriminately and universally, and 

 natural growth was banished not merely in favour of 

 stately lines and domes and pyramids of verdure, 

 but to give place to endless freaks of topiary 

 ingenuity or humour which often destroyed the 

 balance and restfulness of the garden design. The 

 gardens at Levens survive to show us the good 

 and the bad of their day. What could be more 

 curious yet uncomfortable, more elaborately skilful 

 yet aesthetically distressing, than that portion next to 

 the house (page xxxiii.) where the collection of strange 

 topiary specimens gives you the impression of a 

 section of a scientific museum rather than of a section 

 of a complete work of art, stretching forth the 

 dignified lines of the fine house until they fade into 

 the landscape. Yet beyond this section, which, instead 

 of lying aside for a special visit, as such an amusing 

 freak should do, thrusts itself centrally into the 

 balanced composition and destroys the effect of the 

 picture, lies an admirable bit of formalism in the 

 shape of the long green alley, with its central circle 

 framed within massive hornbeam hedges, cutting off 



