266 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND. 



avenues. Nature has now regained her rights ; the avenues 

 have been broken into walks and glades, and several distant 

 views admitted." It never seems to have occurred to these 

 landscape-gardeners that an avenue and a yew hedge were in 

 themselves beautiful objects. It is almost like a Norfolk girl 

 who visited Switzerland, and complained that the mountains 

 shut out the view ! Another scheme of wholesale devastation 

 he suggested, was luckily not acted upon. He proposed to 

 blast away that part of the rock on which Powis Castle stands, 

 which forms the first or " Sundial terrace," and make it into 

 a flat lawn. This change would have been completely out of 

 all keeping with the rest of the lovely garden, which had been 

 made in the time of William and Mary, by Lord Rochfort, 

 a Dutchman, who for a few years held the estates. The 

 alterations he carried out at Burghley were also typical of his 

 method. He took away the walls and hedges, entirely swept 

 away a terraced kitchen-garden on a slope near the house, 

 and in its place planted trees ; beyond this wooded-eminence 

 of his own creating, and in front of the site of the old 

 formal garden, he made a lake. "How far the fashionable 

 array, in which Mr. Brown has dressed the grounds, about 

 this venerable building, agrees with its formality, and antique 

 appendages, I dare not take upon me to say," wrote Gilpin, a 

 few years after Brown's work was completed. " A doubt 

 arises," he continues, " whether the old decoration of avenues 

 and parterres was not in a more suitable style of ornament. 

 It is, however, a nice question, that w^ould admit of many 

 plausible arguments on both sides." 



Gilpin also doubts the expedience of the alterations Brown 

 was carrying out at Roche Abbey, when he visited that 

 place. Brown, it is said, was himself unable to draw 

 a line, and had had no artistic training, or education 

 sufficient to understand the historical interest, or natural 

 beauties of the scenes he tried to improve. It is therefore 

 not to be wondered at that he signally failed, on many 

 occasions, in his endeavours to create a more suitable 

 landscape. " Many modern places," wrote Gilpin, " he has 

 adorned and beautified, but a ruin presented a new idea, which 



