HISTORICAL EPILOGUE 397 



the subject, even the Gardening didactic poem and the Didactic 

 Essay on the Picturesque, have proceeded from Kent.' 



We may take Blenheim as another instance of Kent's success. 

 No one better understood how to mould flat ground into gentle 

 unevennesses, the process called by the French, * vallonner,' and 

 a good instance of this was his plantation at Chiswick compared 

 with what Whately considers Bridgman's ' phlegmatic plantation ' 

 in the same garden. 



'Capability' Brown, so nicknamed from his favourite habit 

 of speaking of the ' capabilities ' of the ground he had to view, 

 is the man who, perhaps more than any other, converted the 

 older gardens of England into parks. His method has been 

 shortly summarised thus : ' His declivities were all softened 

 into gentle slopes ; plantations belted the estate, while clumps 

 and single trees were sprinkled over its area.' Brown probably 

 sat for the satirical portrait of ' Lay-Out ' in Peacock's ' Crotchet 

 Castle,' l and although he regarded himself as holding his own 

 with Nature on her own ground, he was undoubtedly a very 

 strong and very limited mannerist. He was so overcome at the 

 result of his treatment of water at Blenheim, that he was heard 

 murmuring to himself in gentle reproach, 'Thames, Thames, 

 thou wilt never forgive me.' 



The poet Gray, who had a fine instinct for beauty in Nature, 

 hailed the dawn of Natural Gardening as the only Art, which 

 the English could properly call their own. The literary counter- 

 parts of the school are George Mason's ' Essay on Design in 

 Gardening' and Horace Walpole's still more famous Essay, 2 

 (which has often been quoted) ; and, chief of all, Thomas Whately's 

 " Observations on Modern Gardening.' This according to Loudon 

 is ' the grand fundamental and standard work on English Garden- 

 ing.' Whately claims for gardening that 'it has ceased to be 

 mechanical ' and become a fine art, joining utility to pleasure : 

 no longer for the mere pleasure of the senses, it aspires to 

 entertain the imagination high ground creates a feeling of 



1 And perhaps for Mr Milestone in ' Headlong Hall.' See ante pp. 252-3. 

 * See ante pp. 172-8 and 203-4. 



