THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE SCHOOL 



303 



Read, gaze and weep. It will not be from sadness, but from delighted 

 emotion. You may see your innermost soul, meditate with the sage, sigh 

 with -the lover, and bless Watelet." 



Morfontaine, near Chantilly, famous as the place where the Treaty 

 between France and America was signed, was laid out about 1770 

 upon a waste piece of land presenting enough obstacles to please any land- 

 scape designer. In the early nineteenth century it became the favourite 



^tn^3,.^f -t, 



THE AVIARY AT MORFONTAINE. 



residence of Joseph Bonaparte, who only quitted it in 1806 to accept the 

 Crown of Naples. There was a small garden theatre here with a screen, 

 which being removed, disclosed a natural sylvan background. 



In the Bibliotheque Nationale is a curious volume of Chinese drawings 

 of the eleven principal pleasure houses of the Emperor of China, taken from 

 a collection of pictures on silk that was presented to Louis XVI. These, to- 

 gether with the Chinese text, were published by Le Rouge, who in 1784 also 

 published an extraordinary project by an Italian, Francesco Beltini, for a 



