CHISWICK HOUSE 
than they would be if employed by a painter in the composition 
of a picture.” 
His contemporary, Wheatley, in his introduction to his ‘‘ Ob- 
servations on modern gardening,” claims for landscape-gardening, 
‘in the perfection to which it has been lately brought in England,”’ 
not only a considerable place among the liberal arts, ‘‘ but also 
‘that it is as superior to landscape painting as a reality to a re- 
presentation . . . being relieved now,” he says, “‘ from the restraints 
of regularity, and enlarged beyond the purposes of domestic con- 
venience, the most beautiful, the most simple, the most noble 
scenes of nature are within its province.” But Wheatley, like 
Walpole, held that artificial aids to the picturesque were not only 
justifiable, but necessary, to make Nature natural ; and therefore, 
to deceive successfully, soon became an end in itself. “In wild 
and romantic scenes,”’ he remarks, ‘“‘ may be introduced a ruined 
and low bridge, of which some arches may be still standing, and 
the loss of those which are fallen may be supplied by a few planks, 
with a rail thrown over the vacancy. It is a picturesque object : 
it suits the situation, and if due care be taken in certain respects, 
it gives an imposing air of reality.” 
Thus it was that when topiary work, which is the clipping and 
training of trees and shrubs into shapes, had had its day, when 
French gardening and Dutch gardening were beginning to pall, 
areaction set in. Stiffness and conventionality went out of vogue, 
and under the Georges, fashions in gardens soon passed to the other 
extreme. No device was omitted, no sham was too barefaced, that 
might contribute to the desired effect of picturesqueness, freedom 
of growth, and apparent naturalness, while to secure a prospect, 
to carry the eye up to a given point, no sacrifice was too great. 
The walls of the old Elizabethan garden disappeared, and the sunk 
fence or ‘‘ Ha Ha” took its place. Trees were carefully planted just 
where they. would look best in twenty, forty or fifty years’ time. 
‘Those groups and belts of trees and avenues of varied timber 
which have actually clothed a scenery upon the simple undulations 
of the midlands,” says the author of ‘“‘ Horace Walpole’s World,” 
“result from no pure accident of benevolent nature; they are 
a heritage from that strange century, a legacy (even if in a second 
or third degree) from opulent designers who sketched the picturesque 
by the mile.” 
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