102 



HISTORY OF GARDENING. 



PART I. 



r up 



knows, there may be more beauty in such as are wholly irregular. " Something of this 

 sort," he says, " I have seen in some places, but heard more of it from others, who have 

 lived much among the Chinese." Referring to their studied irregularity, he adds, 

 " When they find this sort of beauty in perfection, so as to hit the eye, they say it is 

 skarawadgi, an expression signifying fine or admirable." It appears from this passage, 

 that the Chinese style had not only been known, but imitated in England, nearly a cen- 

 tury previous to the publication of the Jesuit's Letters, and, at least, sixty years 

 before Kent's time. Sir William Temple retired to East Sheen in 1680, and died in 

 the year 1700. 



472. Sir William Chambers's account of the Chinese style has given rise to much dis- 

 cussion. This author, afterwards surveyor-general, resided some time at Canton, and 

 after returning to England, gave a detailed account of Chinese gardening ; first in the 

 appendix to his Designs of Chinese Buildings, &c. in 1757, and subsequently at greater 

 length in his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, in 1772, and commended, as G. Mason 

 observes, by so good a judge as Gray. Sir William Chambers avows that his 

 information is not derived entirely from personal examination, but chiefly from the con- 

 versation of a Chinese painter ; and it has been very reasonably conjectured, that he has 

 drawn, in some cases, on his own imagination, in order to enhance the reader's opinion 

 of Chinese taste, with the laudable end of improving that of his own country. In his 

 essay of 1757, which was published in French as well as English, and was soon trans- 

 lated, as Hirschfield informs us, into German, he says, " the Chinese taste in laying out 

 gardens is good, and what we have for some time past been aiming at in England." 

 With the exception of their formal and continual display of garden-buildings, and their 

 attempts of raising characters, not only picturesque and pleasing, but also of horror, 

 surprise, and enchantment, Sir William's directions, especially in his second work, will 

 apply to the most improved conceptions of planting, and forming pieces of water, in the 

 modern style ; or, in other words, for creating scenery such as will always resemble, and 

 often might be mistaken for that of nature. But whatever may be the merits of the 

 Chinese in this art, it may reasonably be conjectured, that their taste for picturesque 

 beauty is not so exactly conformable to European ideas on that subject as Sir William 

 would lead us to believe. Their decorative scenes are carried to such an extreme, so 

 encumbered with deceptions, and what we would not hesitate to consider puerilities, and 

 there appears throughout so little reference to utility, that the more mature and chastened 

 taste of Europeans cannot sympathise with them. Chinese taste is, indeed, altogether 

 peculiar; it is undoubtedly perfectly natural to that people, and therefore not to be 

 subjected to European criticism. 



473. Lord Walpole's opinion of the Chinese gardens is that they " are as whimsically 

 irregular as European gardens were formerly uniform and unvaried ; nature in them is 

 as much avoided as in those of our ancestors." In allusion to those of the emperor's 

 palace, described in the Lettres EcUfiantes, he says, " this pretty gaudy scene is the work 



