122 GARDEN-CRAFT. 



writings as these, the laboured treatises of the 

 landscape-school are but petty hagglings over the 

 mint and cummin of things. You go to the writings 

 of the masters of the old formality, to come away 

 invigorated as by a whiff of mountain air straight off 

 Helicon ; they shall give one fresh enthusiasm for 

 Nature, fresh devotion to Art, fresh love for beautiful 

 things. But from the other 



" The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I "- 



they deal with technicalities in the affected language 

 of connoisseurship; they reveal a disenchanted world, 

 a world of exploded hopes given over to the navvies 

 and the critics ; and it is no wonder that writings so 

 prompted should have no charm for posterity ; 

 charm they never had. They are dry as summer 

 dust. 



For the honour of English gardening, and before 

 closing this chapter, I would like to recall that be- 

 tweenity the garden of the transition done at the 

 very beginning of the century of revolution, which 

 unites something of the spirit of the old and of the 

 new schools. Here is Sir Walter Scott's report of 

 the Kelso garden as he first knew it, and after it had 

 been mauled by the landscape-gardener. It was 

 a garden of seven or eight acres adjacent to the 

 house of an ancient maiden lady : 



" It was full of long straight walks between hedges of yew and 

 hornbeam, which rose tall and close on every side. There were 

 thickets of flowering shrubs, a bower, and an arbour, to which access 

 was obtained through a little maze of contorted walks, calling itself a 

 labyrinth. In the centre of the bower was a splendid Platanus or 

 Oriental plane, a huge hill of leaves, one of the noblest specimens of 



