PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION 



During the last few years the question of 

 garden design has been discussed with a zeal 

 possibly out of proportion to its intrinsic import- 

 ance, and the subject, as merely literary material, 

 appears to possess a dangerous fascination for 

 writers with a turn for pretty sentiment rather 

 than for exact habits of thought. It is therefore 

 necessary to recall the attention of the thought- 

 ful lover of gardens to what for the purpose I 

 may call first principles, and it has been the 

 object of this short history to show, by some 

 account of what was actually done in the past, 

 that the gardens which we all admire were not 

 laid out at random, but in accordance with a 

 theory of aesthetic which embraced all the arts 

 in its application. I do not mean by this that 

 the garden designers of the seventeenth century 

 went to work with the deliberate intention of 

 realising a theory, but that, living as they did at 



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