HISTORICAL NOTICES. 
21 
worthy of more than a passing remark, that when the 
change in taste did take place, it emanated from the poet, 
the painter, and the tasteful scholar, rather than from the 
practical man. In the poetical imagination, indeed, the 
ideal type of a modern landscape garden seems always to 
have been more or less shadowed forth. The Yaucluse of 
Petrarch, Tasso’s garden of Armida, the vale of Tempe of 
iElian, were all exquisite conceptions of the modern style. 
And Milton, surrounded as he was by the splendid formali- 
ties of the gardens of his time, copied from no existing 
models, but feeling that Eden must have been free and ma- 
jestic in its outlines, he drew from his inner sense of the 
beautiful, and from nature as he saw her developed in the 
works of the Creator. There, the crisped brooks, — 
y With mazy error under pendant shades 
Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed 
Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art 
In beds and curious knots , but Nature boon 
Pour’d forth profuse, on hill and dale and plain, 
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote 
The open field, and where the unpierced shade 
Imbrown’d the noontide bowers ; thus was this place 
A happy rural seat of various view." 
But it required more than poetical types to change the 
long rooted fashion. The lever of satire needed to be ap- 
plied, and the golden links that bind Nature and Art more 
clearly revealed, before the old system could be made to 
waver. Lord Bacon, who looked deeper into the essence of 
all things than most men of his age, was one of the first to 
feel uneasy under the dominion of the formal taste ; and, in 
his essay on gardens, full of a stately and noble plan, he 
ventured, in the reign of James I. a tilt at the popular taste. 
