GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
ground into an entire country-side. He says: ‘‘ I have enough 
land to keep such a farm as Noah’s when he set up in the Ark with 
a pair of each kind.” ... Again: ‘‘ My present sole occupation 
is planting, in which I have made great progress, and talked very 
learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now and then a lettuce 
runs to séed, overturns all my botany, and I have more than once 
taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the 
deliberation with which trees grow is extremely inconvenient to 
my natural impatience.” Strawberry Hill, accurately described 
by Walpole himself in his letters to Sir Horace Mann, is so famous 
that, had I been allowed to do so, I would have introduced 
a picture of the garden as it now is, with the trees its dilettante 
owner planted, grown up. I should then have added to it a 
fuller report of his distinct place in the history of English garden- 
ing. But all requests, by myself and my publishers, for permis- 
sion from its present owners to draw there, were firmly refused, 
this being the only exception, I rejoice to say, to that universal 
rule of kindly and courteous acquiescence, that has made my task 
im preparing these drawings so delightful. 
We learn that the taste of Pope, as shown in his own grounds 
at Twickenham, had a marked effect on landscape gardening in 
England, and helped a good deal to abolish the stiff Dutch style. 
The introduction of landscape-gardening, or rather its revival— 
because it was the Romans who first brought the art to Britain— 
whatever its defects, was undoubtedly a great improvement on the 
extravagance of the topiary school. 
So much will be said of landscape-gardening in the following 
chapters that I will only here remark that, when formality went 
out of vogue, fashions in gardens ere long passed to the other 
extreme. It was the inevitable swing of the pendulum, and no 
more need be said. 
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