876 



NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS, 



Flowers worthy Paradise ; whicli not nice art. 

 In beds and curious knots, but nature boon 

 Pour'd fortli profuse on hill, and dale, and plain, 

 Both where the momitig sun first warmly smote 

 The open field, and where the unpierced shade 

 Embrown'd the noontide bowers. Thus was this place 

 A happy rural seat of various view." 



Paradise Lost, B. iv. 



Kent, to whom we certainly owe the art of modern gardening, lived 

 in the beginning of the last century. He was by profession a painter, 

 and had the taste and ingenuity to superinduce the principles of the 

 new art on his previous studies* No one, probably, but a painter would 

 have thought of making use of the colours of nature to improve and 

 heighten the effect of real scenery. The great principles on which he 

 worked (as Walpole truly observes) were perspective, and light and 

 shade ; and thus his imagination bestowed the arts of landscape on the 

 scenes which he undertook to improve. Bridgeman, the fashionable 

 designer of the day, had a short time before invented the sunk fence, 

 which was a material step to the connecting of the garden and the park ; 

 but " Kent (says the same lively writer) leaped the fence, and saw that 

 all nature was a garden." — See " Anecdotes of Painting in England." 



Kent returned from Rome, where he had gone to perfect himself in 

 his profession, under the patronage of Lord Burlington, about the year 

 1721. The first places which he laid out in the new style, were Clare- 

 mont and Esher. This happened in 1728 or 17S0 ; so that, as "Paradise 

 Lost" first came out in 1667, it may be said that more than a hundred 

 and thirty years intervened between the time of Bacon and that of Kent, 

 and more than threescore between that of Milton and the last-mentioned 

 period. 



Note IV. Page 6. 



" The Landscape," a poem by the late ingenious Mr Knight, and the 

 " Essays on the Picturesque," by that accomplished scholar Sir Uvedale 

 Price, are productions of high merit, which we must ever value as 

 having been the means of retrieving the public taste, and showing what 

 is unnatural, formal, or monotonous in the character of the school of 

 Brown and Repton. Yet, as these meritorious works were composed 

 ■under peculiar circumstances, and during the bitterness of controversy, 

 they should be perused with some allowance on that account. Mr 

 Loudon's able treatise also on the " Improvement of Country Residences" 

 (which came out in 1806, and has not been half so much commended as 

 it deserves) forms an admirable guide to the man of taste, or the 



