86 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iv 



and stone colour. The unutterable dulness of 

 the English Country House of the early part of 

 the last century is suggested here in all its weari- 

 some pedantry. The effort aimed at seems to 

 have been a sort of correct respectability of 

 colour, something which should not violate de- 

 corum. The garden front of Hampton Court 

 is a sufficient answer to such a grotesque as- 

 sertion. The principles of landscape gardening, 

 or rather certain assumptions which do duty for 

 principles, were first formulated by Thomas 

 Wheatly, in his Observations on Modern Garden- 

 ings published in 1776, which became the standard 

 book on the Jardin Anglais^ and has, so far as 

 any theory is concerned, remained so ever since. 

 Wheatly further signalised himself by completely 

 destroying the remains of the formal gardens at 

 Nonsuch in 1786. Horace Walpole pubHshed 

 an Essay on Modern Gardening in 1785, in 

 which he repeated what other writers had said 

 on the subject. This was at once translated 

 and had a great circulation on the continent.^ 

 The Jardin a V Anglaise became. the rage ; many 

 beautiful old gardens were destroyed in France 



^ The Jardin a I' Anglaise was purely and simply what is now known 

 as landscape gardening — a term which betrays its origin in the latter 

 part of the eighteenth century. Certain writers have spoken of the 

 landscape garden as " The English Garden," but in point of fact till the 

 middle of the eighteenth century a view of garden design precisely 

 opposed to this prevailed in England as well as in other civilised countries 

 of Europe. So far, therefore, as history goes, the older, that is the formal 

 garden, has the real claim to be called the English garden. Curiously 

 enough, Taine {Voyage en Italie), in a sketch of the Villa Albani, con- 

 fuses the "Jardui Anglah with the older garden. 



