1IntroC>uction 21 



gardens (1690) had struck his ardent and para- 

 doxical imagination. He loved to work upon an 

 unequal and irregular ground (Alphana). He 

 wanted obstacles to overcome, if there were none. 

 He raised a mountain on a plain. His style had 

 something of the modern English manner, but his 

 projects were rarely carried into execution. Gabriel 

 Thouin asserts {Plans raisonnee) that the first ex- 

 ample of modern landscape gardening was given 

 by Dufresny in the Fauborg St. Antoine. Du- 

 fresny was a man of 'ideas,' one of which Montes- 

 qiiieu adopted in his Lettres de Paysannes. " 



If Louis XIV had not thought the plans Dufresny 

 made for Versailles too expensive we might have had 

 something very different in spirit from that of Le 

 Notre's final development. 



In Germany about the middle of the eighteenth 

 century we find Hirschfeld who exhibits a knowledge 

 of the natural style and quotes predecessors who have 

 the same feelings. It is wonderful how quickly a new 

 and striking phase of art will all at once bud and come 

 into full flower. The germ of the idea may be almost 

 silently developing at a much earlier date as in the case 

 of Milton and P6re Huet, but the actual flower of 

 modern landscape gardening appears only in its fuU 

 beauty and perfection of artistic development in the 

 middle of the eighteenth century in the works of 

 Kent, Brown, and Humphrey Repton and soon after- 

 ward of Prince Puckler von Muskau. 



