24 
LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
practice, the reform in taste which Addison and Pope had 
so completely developed in theory. 
Among the landmarks of the progress of the taste, we must 
not refuse a passing notice of what seems to have been an 
unique and beautiful specimen of the new feeling for em- 
bellished nature — Leasowes, the “ sentimental farm” of S hen- 
stone. From contemporary accounts, it appears to have 
been originally a grazing farm, from which, by tasteful 
arrangement and planting, and pretty walks, seats, root- 
house, urns, and appropriate inscriptions, the poet created a 
scene of much pastoral and poetical beauty. 
The modern style, was now running high in popular 
favour in England, but the next professor of the art, Brown, 
seems to have been a mannerist with so little true sym- 
pathy with nature, as to be made the jest of every succeed- 
ing generation — great and fashionable, as the fortune he 
amassed, and the long list of royal and noble places 
which he remodelled, sufficiently prove him to have been in 
his day. “ Capability” Brown, as he was nicknamed, saw 
in every new place great capabilities, but unfortunately his 
own mind seems to have furnished but one model — a round 
lake, a smooth bare lawn, a clump of trees and a boundary 
belt — which he expanded, with few variations, to suit the 
compass of an estate of a thousand acres, or a cottage with 
a few roods. His works were often on a grand scale, and 
he boasted that the Thames would never forgive him for 
the rival he had created in the artificial lake at Blenheim. 
“ The places he altered,” says Loudon, u are beyond all 
reckoning. Improvement was the fashion of the time ; and 
there was scarcely a country gentleman who did not, on some 
occasion or other, consult the gardening idol of the day . 55 
Mason, the poet, praises this artist, and Horace Walpole apolo- 
