LANDSCAPE GARDENING 263 



It is strange the way in which the writers of this school 

 pointed to Milton and Bacon as the founders of their taste. 

 They claimed Bacon because he devotes a part of his ideal 

 garden to a " natural wildness," and also praises " green grass 

 kept finely shorn," and Milton, because he says that in 

 Paradise there were 



" Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice art 

 In beds and curious knots, but nature boon 

 Poured forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain."* 



Yet how opposed to all ideas of landscape gardeners would 

 these two men have been. Bacon, who loved the green grass, 

 and yet would have his garden full of flowers in bloom in 

 every month of the year, would have been shocked by the 

 idea of " a garden . . . disgracing by discordant character the 

 contiguous lawn," or by being told that " the flower-garden 

 ought never to be visible from the windows of the house." 

 Sir Walter Scott,^ in one of his charming articles on landscape 

 gardening, points out that Milton never intended to censure 

 the " trim gardens " of his own day, although he pictured 

 natural beauties in the newly-created Paradise. Scott well 

 understood the great mistake that had been made in destroy- 

 ing these memorials of the past. He saw how perfectly an 

 Elizabethan garden harmonized with the house, and while he 

 could not vindicate the " paltry imitations of the Dutch, who 

 clipped yews into monsters," he acknowledged that there 

 existed gardens, " the work of London and Wise, and such 

 persons as laid out ground in the Dutch taste, which would be 

 much better subjects for modification than for absolute 

 destruction." He admired the fine terraces, flights of steps, 

 vases and balustrades, of gardens in the Italian style, and the 

 fountains and waterworks of the French. 



Sir Uvedale Price, although he was the champion of rational 

 landscape gardening, could only justify a " jet d'eau," because 

 such things were to be seen in the form of Geysers. Sir Walter 

 Scott, still more large-minded, felt sure that the captivating 

 beauty " of a magnificent fountain . . . flinging up its waters 



* Paradise Lost, Book IV. 



^ Quarterly Review, vol. xxxvii., 1828, and Criticism, vol. v. 



