GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



Lord Burlington's severer and finer taste must have restrained 

 his lieutenant's tendency to the baroque and rococo in art ; for 

 Kent's extravagances and limitations, are much in evidence in 

 some of the rooms he decorated at Kensington Palace. Fortunately 

 for Chiswick House, the ceilings and cornices there are apparently 

 by a less heavy hand, and the Earl, in all probability, brought over 

 foreign workmen to carry out this part of his scheme. 



The grounds of Chiswick House, though they differ from those 

 of the imagined paradise of my childhood, are not less beautiful 

 in reality than in our conception of them. They are very fine and 

 characteristic examples of the landscape-gardening of the eighteenth 

 century, when landscape-gardening reached its highest develop- 

 ment. English taste soon framed a national style far removed 

 from the wide, formal, and stately manner of the French Le 

 Notre, and his English pupil, Rose. According to the author of 

 " Horace Walpole's World," trees in France became royal pro- 

 perty as soon as they had attained the age of thirty years ; in 

 England, happily for us, they were spared to grow old gracefully. 

 Horace Walpole remarks in his " Essay on Gardening " that 

 " when a Frenchman reads of the Garden of Eden, his mind 

 conjures up a picture of Versailles, with clipt hedges, berceaux 

 and trellis work. . . . He does not consider that four of the largest 

 rivers in the world were half so magnificent as one hundred 

 fountains, full of statues by Girardin." 



Horace contrasts this artificiality with the lovely freedom 

 of nature, in which each tree and shrub is suffered to grow as it 

 lists. He ridicules the fact that the " venerable oak, the romantic 

 beech, the useful elm, and even the sweeping circuit of the lime, 

 and the regular round of the chestnut, and the almost moulded 

 orange-tree, were corrected by such fantastic admirers of symmetry. 

 The compass, the square, were of more use in the plantation," 

 he says, " than the nurseryman." 



But while thus singing the praises of natural beauty, this ac- 

 complished product of the age of whalebone and wiggery, at the 

 same time applauded and encouraged the most rampant artificiality ; 

 for he advocates the introduction into the picture of a " feigned 

 steeple, of a distant church, or an unreal bridge, to disguise the 

 termination of water," and argues that " being intended to improve 

 the landscape, they are no more to be condemned because common, 



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