140 
REVIEW OF'" THE FLOWER GARDEN." 
channel of a dried-up brook, with irregular edgings of broken turf and stone to 
match. " Our present landscape gardeners/' says Sir Henry Steuart, " have made 
a merit, and are singularly vain, of disfiguring their most beautiful subjects with 
clumps and plantations, and even approaches, in the most zig-zag and grotesque 
figures, which are ten times more hideous and unpicturesque than the worst produc- 
tions of their predecessors. A late powerful writer (Sir Walter Scott) says, " their 
plantations, instead of presenting the regular or rectilinear plan, exhibit nothing 
but a number of broken lines, interrupted circles, and salient angles, which are as 
much at variance with Euclid as with nature. In cases of enormity, they have 
been made to assume the form of pincushions, of hatchets, of penny tarts, and 
breeches, displayed at old clothesmen's doors. In all these they tell you they are 
imitating nature." 
" There is not a man," says Sir Henry Steuart, " whose taste has been formed 
on any correct model, that does not feel and acknowledge the beauty of those 
elegant forms, the oval, the circle, and the cone ; and there are few well educated 
persons who will for a moment compare to them a multitude of obtuse and acute 
angles, great and small, following each other in fantastical and unmeaning succes- 
sion. It is to be hoped that there is discernment enough in our present race of 
artists to see the propriety of adopting, or restoring those fine figures, the oval and 
the circle." Not only the oval and the circle, however, are proscribed to make way 
for artist-like arabesques, but all corresponding things must be avoided for the 
sake of irregularity ; and to escape from the style satirised by Pope, in which 
" Grove nods at grove, each alley has its brother, 
And half the garden just reflects the other." 
A striking metropolitan example of the present taste for non-correspondent and 
irregular patch-work, may be seen in the sloping garden ground, in front of the 
Hospital at the Southwark end of London-bridge. The main plot is an imperfect 
oval, lying sideways on the slope ; and the smaller ones, at each side, are of no 
describable form, except, perhaps, that of an old carpet, with the worn parts cut away 
to make it look a little respectable. How badly this appears, either in contrast or in 
harmony with the square style of the edifice and the adjacent roads, must strike 
every observer to be as much out of taste as one of Salvator Rosa's rugged ravines 
and banditti would appear, if patched into the centre of the foreground of a classical 
landscape of Claude, or as a furze bush would look in the midst of a bed of 
tulips. 
Even this style, however, does not appear to me to be so reprehensible as the 
finically grotesque figures, of which a metropolitan example may be seen in the 
garden now (1837) laying out in the front of Bethlem Hospital, and a more gro- 
tesque one in the gardens of the Botanical and Horticultural Society at Birming- 
ham, the plan of the borders of the pleasure-ground having been apparently bor- 
rowed from old-fashioned tamboured muslin or printed calicoes. " Involutions," as 
Sir Walter Scott says, speaking of this style of laying out grounds, " of bizarre and 
extravagant irregularity, resembling the irregular flourishes in Corporal Trim's 
