WILLIAM WINDHAM 217 



intermixed with vines and flowers (as I have seen them in Italian 

 villas and in some old English gardens in the same style) the 

 mixture of splendor, richness and neatness was beautiful and 

 pleasing in the highest degree. But the modern art of landscape 

 gardening, as it is called, takes away all natural enrichment, and 

 adds none of its own ; unless, indeed, meagre and formal clumps 

 of trees, and still more formal patches of shrubs may be called 

 enrichment. Why this art has been called landscape gardening, 

 perhaps he, who gave it the title, may explain. I can see no 

 reason unless it be the efficacy which it has shown in destroying 

 landscapes, in which, indeed, it seems to be infallible ; not one 

 complete painter's composition being, I believe, to be found in 

 any of the numerous, and many of them beautiful and picturesque 

 spots, which it has visited in different parts of this island. An 

 Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste, 1805. 



T HOPE therefore that you will publish the system which I RT. HON. 

 conceive you to have adopted, and vindicate to the art of ^INDI^A 

 laying out ground its true principles, which are wholly different (1750-1810). 

 from those which these wild improvers (Payne Knight and 

 Uvedale Price) would wish to introduce. Places are not to be 

 laid out with a view to their appearance in a picture, but to their 

 uses, and the enjoyment of them in real life ; and their conformity 

 to those purposes is that which constitutes their beauty: with 

 this view, gravel walks and neat mown lawns, and in some 

 situations, straight alleys, fountains, terraces, and for aught I know, 

 parterres and cut hedges are in perfect good taste, and infinitely 

 more conformable to the principles which form the basis of our 

 pleasure in these instances, than the docks, and thistles, and litter 

 and disorder, that may make a much better figure in a picture. 

 Letter to Humphry Repton^ on his controversy with Uvedale Price, 

 1794, 



