GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



ground into an entire country-side. He says : ' I have enough 

 land to keep such a farm as Noah's when he set up in the Ark with 

 a pair of each kind." . . . Again : " My present sole occupation 

 is planting, in which I have made great progress, and talked very 

 learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now and then a lettuce 

 runs to seed, overturns all my botany, and I have more than once 

 taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the 

 deliberation with which trees grow is extremely inconvenient to 

 my natural impatience." Strawberry Hill, accurately described 

 by Walpole himself in his letters to Sir Horace Mann, is so famous 

 that, had I been allowed to do so, I would have introduced 

 a picture of the garden as it now is, with the trees its dilettante 

 owner planted, grown up. I should then have added to it a 

 fuller report of his distinct place in the history of English garden- 

 ing. But all requests, by myself and my publishers, for permis- 

 sion from its present owners to draw there, were firmly refused, 

 this being the only exception, I rejoice to say, to that universal 

 rule of kindly and courteous acquiescence, that has made my task 

 in preparing these drawings so delightful. 



We learn that the taste of Pope, as shown in his own grounds 

 at Twickenham, had a marked effect on landscape gardening in 

 England, and helped a good deal to abolish the stiff Dutch style. 

 The introduction of landscape-gardening, or rather its revival 

 because it was the Romans who first brought the art to Britain- 

 whatever its defects, was undoubtedly a great improvement on the 

 extravagance of the topiary school. 



So much will be said of landscape-gardening in the following 

 chapters that I will only here remark that, when formality went 

 out of vogue, fashions in gardens ere long passed to the other 

 extreme. It was the inevitable swing of the pendulum, and no 

 more need be said. 



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