Ill THE FORMAL GARDEN 53 



principles which govern it. He was not better 

 educated, but he succeeded to an excellent way 

 of doing things as the result of many generations 

 of experience and uninterrupted development, 

 instead of having to choose between half a dozen 

 different ways, with all of which he is equally 

 unfamiliar. It was thus that, in the seventeenth 

 century, the country gentleman might be able 

 to lay out his own garden, because, with trifling 

 variations, he laid it out on the same lines as 

 his father and his grandfather before him. 



In more important work, however, there 

 seems little doubt that the architect, or rather 

 the architect builder, as he usually was, designed 

 the grounds as well as the. house, and this 

 continued to be the custom till the days of 

 Capability Brown. Du Cerceau, in the plates 

 of his Les Plus Excellents Bastiments, gives 

 quite as much attention to the gardens as to 

 the palaces ; and in all books of illustration 

 throughout the seventeenth century, house and 

 grounds are shown as a whole. There is a 

 small plan of a house and garden by John 

 Thorpe in the Soane Museum, which shows a 

 square house, with courts in back and front, and 

 garden at the side, divided into four main plots, 

 subdivided into smaller knots and squares. On 

 the back court is written a note " nothing out 

 of square." John Thorpe died early in the 

 seventeenth century. The distinction of all 

 these earlier seventeenth-century garden plans 



