HISTORICAL NOTICES. 13 



plough, fine natural woods were gradually cut off, and wild 

 landscape beauties, once so common as to be unheeded, be- 

 came sufficiently rare to be more prized and admired. The 

 increased admiration of landscape painting, poetry, and other 

 fine arts, by imbuing many minds with a love of beautiful 

 and picturesque nature, also tended to create a change in the 

 taste. Gradually, men of refined sensibilities perceived that 

 besides mere beauty of form, natural objects have another 

 and a much higher kind of beauty — namely, the beauty of 



EXPRESSION.* 



With the recognition of this principle commenced a new 

 era in Ornamental Gardening. The defects of the Geometric 

 School, were freely pointed out and discussed, by writers of 

 cultivated susceptibility and taste, and an entire revolution 

 suddenly took place in the public mind. With a higher per- 

 ception of the capacities of Landscape Gardening, gradually 

 grew up another class of artists, who, laying aside the pre- 

 judice which allowed men to see beauty in Gardens, only 

 through the manifestation of design, derived from the study 

 of nature, new elements to interest the mind as well as elevate 

 the art. One of these, looking around him for materials, ob- 

 serves the spirit and expression of natural objects, the varied 

 forms of ground and water, and the character of trees indi- 

 vidually and in composition. He perceives that there is an 

 expression of dignity and majesty in an old oak, of graceful- 

 ness and luxuriance in a fine sweeping elm, or of the spirited 



♦ " When the arts have made this progress, circumstances arise which alter in 

 a great measure, the taste of mankind, and introduce a different opinion with re- 

 gard to the beauty of design. Two cause?, more especially, conspire to this: 

 1st. The discovery, gradually made, that other and much more affecting qualities 

 are capable of being expressed by forms than that of mere design ; and 2d, the pro- 

 gress of the arts themselves, which naturally, render comparatively easy, what at 

 first was difficult — and consequently render the production of regularity or uni- 

 formity less forcibly the sign of tkill than at first." — ^ilkon on Tasle, 



