lO 



ROYAL GARDENS 



The pleasant formality of the Jacobean period became ex- 

 cessive stiffness during the next three or four reigns, and this 

 in turn brought about a far too violent reaction. Addison 

 and Pope poured ridicule on the classic formal mannerism, and 

 so paved the way for the ruthless destruction indulged in by 

 the later followers of the new "Nature" school. The pioneers 

 of the movement were Bridgeman, Kent and Brown. Their 

 ideas were to go direct to nature for a model. This is all 

 very well if not carried, as it was by some of them and their 

 followers, to a ridiculous extreme. They seem to have lost 

 sight of the fact that they were dealing with an enclosed plot 

 and not a landscape. They tried, and tried in vain, to repro- 

 duce all the features of an extensive tract of country within 

 the limits of a garden. And, worst of all, they were not 

 content with destroying the bad and adapting the good, but 

 in sadly many cases they swept away every trace of old-time, 

 often charming, formality. Handsome terraces, evergreen 

 hedges, stately parterres, level expanses of beautiful turf and 

 all straight paths were utterly abolished to make room for 

 hills and dales, streams, cascades, artificial lakes and aimlessly 

 winding paths. But perhaps more than all obnoxious to the 

 taste of to-day were the sham old ruins sometimes introduced. 

 Brown was the most famous of the school, and possibly owing 

 to that, has frequently been blamed for things he is most 

 unlikely to have done. At all events it is to his lasting credit 

 that when asked to " improve " Hampton Court garden he 

 •declined ; and his original work at Blenheim, Longleat and 

 Wilton still remains to show that his appellative, " Capability," 

 was by no means ill-earned. 



So far as garden design is concerned, the later years of the 

 eighteenth century and fully three quarters of the nineteenth 

 seem to have suffered from a not surprising reaction after 

 the terribly expensive remodellings of the natural-landscape 

 school, and among the stationary or retrograde methods of 

 this period, Repton stands out almost alone as having made 

 an advance. He revived and improved upon the excellent 

 theory of Bridgeman, which only had a short vogue in its 



