LANDSCAPE GARDENING 253 



felled by his orders. He was lost in admiration of the rivers 

 and lakes he created. Having completed one of these, he 

 thought he had achieved such a success as to surpass the 

 Thames, and is said to have exclaimed : " Thames ! Thames ! 

 thou wilt never forgive me!" At Hackwood Park, 1 in 

 Hampshire, Brown effected various changes, which were thus 

 spoken of a few years later : " Alterations on a considerable 

 scale " were carried out, particularly on the south of the 

 house, where there had been a garden " in the old style, with 

 terraces, ascended by flights of steps, and adorned with statues 

 on pedestals, a great reservoir of water, angular ramparts, &c. ; 

 the view from the house was also interrupted by high yew hedges 

 skirting long and formal avenues. Nature has now regained 

 her rights ; the avenues have been broken into walks and 

 glades, and several distant views admitted." It never seems 

 to have occurred to these landscape-gardeners that an avenue 

 and a yew hedge were in themselves beautiful objects. It is 

 almost like a Norfolk girl who visited Switzerland, and com- 

 plained that the mountains shut out the view ! Another 

 scheme of wholesale devastation he suggested was luckily not 

 acted upon. He proposed to blast away that part of the rock^- 

 on which Powis Castle stands, which forms the first or " Sundial 

 terrace," and make it into a flat lawn. This change would have 

 been completely out of all keeping with the rest of the lovely 

 garden, which had been made in the time of William and Mary, 

 by Lord Rochfort, a Dutchman, who for a few years held the 

 estates. The alterations he carried out at Burghley were 

 also typical of his method. He took away the walls and hedges, 

 entirely swept away a terraced kitchen-garden on a slope 

 near the house, and in its place planted trees ; beyond this 

 wooded eminence of his own creating, and in front of the site 

 of the old formal garden, he made a lake. " How far the 

 fashionable array, in which Mr. Brown has dressed the grounds, 

 about this venerable building, agrees with its formality, and 

 antique appendages, I dare not take upon me to say," wrote 

 Gilpin, a few years after Brown's work was completed. " A 

 doubt arises," he continues, " whether the old decoration of 

 avenues and parterres was not in a more suitable style of orna- 

 1 Belonging to Lord Bolton. 



