IV THE LANDSCAPE SCHOOL 83 



of a painter as well as an architect, and he set to 

 work with both hands, as it were, on garden 

 design ; for while with his T-square and com- 

 passes he would design indifferently Grecian 

 temples, Anglo-Saxon ruins, or Gothic churches 

 for the grounds, he proceeded to form landscape 

 compositions on the most heroic scale that surely 

 has ever entered the head of any painter, for the 

 solid earth was to be his canvas, and the trees 

 water and rocks his paints. With these mate- 

 rials he endeavoured to the best of his ability to 

 reproduce the landscapes of Claude and Poussin ; 

 but he signally failed of his purpose, for instead 

 of the classical breadth and repose of those great 

 masters, the whole result was fussiness. Accord- 

 ing to Sir William Chambers, " Our virtuosi 

 have scarcely left an acre of shade, or three trees 

 growing in a line, from the Land's End to the 

 Tweed." Chambers himself published his Dis- 

 sertation on Oriental Gardens in 1773. This 

 led, however, to little result beyond the use of 

 light trellis work for verandahs and the backs 

 of garden seats. This is how Walpole, most 

 elegant of gushers, describes Kent's work : 

 "Selecting favourite objects, and veiling de- 

 formities by screens of plantations, he realised 

 the composition of the greatest masters in paint- 

 ing. The living landscape was chastened and 

 polished, not transformed." The chastening of 

 nature was rather severe, for we find that it con- 

 sisted in wholesale destruction of trees, alteration 



c; 



