HISTORICAL EPILOGUE 409 



To return to our own country. In the nineteenth century, 

 no one better than Sir Walter Scott has held the just balance 

 between the two rival schools, and his ' Essay on Landscape 

 Gardening,' written in 1828, might almost be said to embody the 

 prevailing views of to-day upon the subject. Its keynote is a wise 

 eclecticism, the choice of the best that has been done in design- 

 ing, laying out, 'composing' or building gardens in every age, 

 adapted to the particular site, and its natural and architectural 

 surroundings. 



Scott's Essay seems the neutral ground upon which those 

 desperate rivals, the Architects and Landscape Gardeners the 

 partizans of the Formal and of the Natural Garden may meet 

 half-way. For the former there is the comfort of the famous sen- 

 tence, ' Nothing is more completely the child of art than n 

 garden,' and the longer passage on the architectural garden : 

 ' The result was in the highest degree artificial, but it was a 

 sight beautiful in itself a triumph of human art over the elements, 

 and connected as these ornamented gardens were with splendid 

 mansions, in the same character, there was a symmetry and har- 

 mony betwixt the baronial palace itself, and these its natural 

 appendages, which recommended them to the judgment as well 

 as to the eye,' and he can justify even ' the magnificent cascades ' 

 of Versailles. He shows the difference between the Italian and 

 Dutch taste with its 'paltry imitations.' 'A stone hewn into a 

 gracefully ornamented vase or urn has a value which it did not 

 before possess, a yew hedge clipped into a fortification is only 

 defaced. The one is a production of Art, the other a distortion 

 of Nature.' Yet even so, he thinks that existing gardens in the 

 Dutch taste * would be much better subjects for our modification 

 than for absolute destruction.' Then he shows how excellent 

 was the ruling principle of Kent's innovation, but that Kent 

 failed in execution from his limited view of Nature, through 

 being * tame and cold in spirit,' and unfamiliar with her grander 

 scenes ; thus ' his meagre and unvaried slopes were deprived 

 of all pretension to a natural appearance ' ; and ' his style is 

 not simplicity but affectation labouring to seem simple.' Scott 



