232 LONDON PARKS & GARDENS 



lines." He imagines that fanciful advocates of landscape 

 gardening will object to this as too formal, and be "further 

 shocked " by learning that he hoped they would be kept 

 cut and trimmed. Within were to be " groves in one 

 quarter of the area, the other three enriched with flowers 

 and shrubs, each disposed in a different manner, to indulge 

 the various tastes for regular or irregular gardens." He 

 ends his description by saying : " A few years hence, when 

 the present patches of shrubs shall have become thickets 

 — when the present meagre rows of trees shall have 

 become an umbrageous avenue — and the children now in 

 their nurses' arms shall have become the parents or grand- 

 sires of future generations — this square may serve to 

 record, that the Art of Landscape Gardening in the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century was not directed 

 by whim or caprice, but founded on a due consideration 

 of utility as well as beauty, without a bigoted adherence 

 to forms and lines, whether straight, or crooked, or 

 serpentine." 



Repton always put forth his ideas in high-sounding 

 language, often not so well justified as in the present 

 case. The lime-trees have been allowed to grow taller 

 than he desired, and yet are not fine trees from having at 

 one period been kept trimmed ; but they certainly form an 

 attractive addition to the usual design, and looking at 

 them, after nearly a hundred years, from the outside, 

 where they form a background to the statue, the effect 

 in summer is very attractive. 



Bedford Square is on the gardens of the other great 

 house — Montagu House, built by the Duke of Montagu. 

 Evelyn also notes going to see that. In 1676, " I dined," 

 he says, "with Mr. Charleton and went to see Mr. 

 Montagu's new palace near Bloomsbury, built by 



