HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 63 



flowers offers pleasant flattery to the smell and sight, 

 Nature alone, modestly arrayed, and never made up, 

 there spreads out her ornaments and benefits. How 

 the fountains beget the shrubs and beautify them ! 

 How the shadows of the woods put the streams 

 to sleep in beds of herbage." This is poetry ! 

 but it is well that one French writer (and he 

 so distinguished) should be found to depict an 

 English garden, when architects like Jussieu and 

 Antoine Richard signally failed to reproduce the 

 thing, to order, upon French soil ! And the Petit 

 Trianon was in itself an improvement upon, or 

 rather a protest against, the sumptuous splendour of 

 the Orangerie, the basins of Latona and of Neptune, 

 and the superb tapis vert, with its bordering groves 

 of clipt trees and shrubs. Yet here is Arthur 

 Young's unflattering description of the Queen's 

 Jar din Anglois at Trianon: " It contains about 100 

 acres, disposed in the taste of what we read of in 

 books of Chinese gardening, whence it is supposed 

 the English style was taken. There is more of 

 Sir William Chambers here than of Mr. Brown,* 

 more effort than Nature, and more expence than 

 taste. It is not easy to conceive anything that Art 

 can introduce in a garden that is not here ; woods, 

 rocks, lawns, lakes, rivers, islands, cascades, grottoes, 



* Miss Edwards (and I quote from her edition of Young's 

 "Travels in France," p. 101) has a note to the effect that the Mr. 

 Brown here referred to is " Robert Brown, of Markle, contributor to 

 the Edinburgh Magazine, 1757-1831." Yet, surely this is none other 

 than Mr. "Capability" Brown, discoverer of English scenery, reputed 

 father of the English garden ! 



