292 GARDEN CRAFT IN EUROPE 



be advanced and perfected hy the united powers of the landscape painter 

 and the practical gardener." In, I7^5_he published Sketches and Hints on 

 Landscape ^ Gardening, wherein he lays down the four following rules for 

 "the design jif. a garden. "First it must display the natural beauties and 

 hide the natural defects of every situation. Secondly, it should give the 

 appearance of extent and freedom, by carefully disguising or hiding the 

 _boundary. Thirdly^ it must studiously conceal every interference of art, how- 

 ever expensive, by which the scenery is improved; making the whole appear 

 ^the production of nature only; and fourthly, all objects of mere convenience 

 or comfort, if incapable of being made ornamental, or of becoming proper 

 parts of "the general scenery, must be removed or concealed." He was the 

 author of several other works on the same subject and continued to practise 

 his profession of "producing beautiful effects " until his death in_i_8i8^ 



A further impetus to the landscape school was given by Sir William 

 Chambers, who published A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening in 1772. 

 This work created a commotion quite out of keeping with its value, and it 

 is said that with the exception of the preface, which is in earnest enough, 

 the book is really a solemn joke intended to mystify the public, and prompted 

 to a certain extent by a personal feeling against Capability Brown, who had 

 obtained a commission for laying out an important estate which Chambers 

 coveted. It is this which gives point to the following sarcastic description 

 of the English garden of his day, a description little exaggerated, as we know 

 from other records of Brown's methods of dealing with the surroundings of 

 a house. " Our gardens," he says, " differ very little from common fields, 

 so closely is common nature copied in most of them. There is generally so 

 little variety in the objects, such a poverty of imagination in the contrivance, 

 and of art in the arrangement, that these compositions rather appear the 

 offspring of chance than design, and a stranger is often at a loss to know 

 whether he is walking in a meadow or in a pleasure-ground, made and kept 

 at a considerable expense. He sees nothing to amuse him, nothing to excite 

 his curiosity, ^nor anything to keep up his attention. At his first entrance, 

 he is treated with the sight of a large green field, scattered over with a few 

 straggling trees, and verged with a confused border of little shrubs and 

 flowers; after further inspection, he finds a little serpentine path, twining 

 in regular 'esses (sic) among the shrubs of the border, upon which he is to go 

 round, to look on one side at what he has already seen — the large green field, 



