320 



til Oeds and curious kiiols, but iiuturc's boon. 

 I'ourcd foith profuse on liill, nnddulc, and plain, 

 B'jtli \s'1ii re the niorniiig sun first warmly smote 

 The open licld, and wliore the unpierced sliade 

 Erabrown'd tlie noontide bow'rs. Thus was this placu 

 A liappy rural seat of various view. 



Paradise Lost, B. IV. 



Kent) to whom we certainly owe the art of modern gardening, lived 

 in the beginning of the last century. He was by profession a painter, 

 and had the taste and ingenuity to superinduce the priirciples of the new 

 art on his previous studies. No one, probably, but a painter would have 

 thought of making use of the colours of nature, to improve and heighten 

 the effect of real scenery. The great principles on which he worked 

 (as Walpole truly observes), were perspective, and light and shade ; and 

 thus his imagination bestowed the arts of landscape, on the scenes 

 which he undertook to improve. Bridgeman, the fashionable designer 

 of the day, had, a short time before, invented the smik fence, wliich was 

 a material step to the comiecting of the garden and the park : but 

 " Kent (says the same lively writer) leaped the fence, and saw that all 

 nature was a garden." — See Anecdotes of Painting in England. 



Kent returned from Rome, where he had gone to perfect liimself in 

 his profession, under the patronage of Lord Burlington, about the year 

 1721. The first places, which he laid out in the new style, were Clare- 

 mont and Esher. This happened in 1728 or 1730 ; so that, as Paradise 

 Lost first came out in 1667, it may be said, that more than a hundred- 

 and-thirty years intervened between the time of Bacon and that of Kent, 

 and more than three-score, between that of Milton and the last men- 

 tioned period. 



Note IV. Page 8. 



" The Landscape," a poem, by the late ingenious Mr. Knight, and the 

 " Essays on the Picturesque," by that accomplished scholar Sir Uvedale 

 Price, are productions of high merit, which we must ever value, as 

 having been the means of retrieving the public taste, and showing what 

 is unnatural, formal, or monotonous in the character of the school of 

 Brown and Repton. Yet, as these meritorious works were composed 

 under pecuhar circiunstances, and during the bitterness of controversy, 

 they should be perused with some allowance, on that account. Mr. 

 Loudon's able treatise also, on the " Improvement of Country Residen- 

 ces" (which came out in 1806, and has not been half so much com- 

 mended as it deserves), forma an admirable guide to the man of taste, or 



