LOMBARD VILLAS 
fragrant smell, the beautiful Prospect, and the delighting 
Variety that is here makes it such a habitation for Sum- 
mer that perhaps the whole World hath nothing like it." 
Seventeenth-century travellers were unanimous in 
extolling the Isola Bella, though, as might have been 
expected, their praise was chiefly for those elaborations 
and ingenuities of planning and engineering which give 
least pleasure in the present day. Toward the middle 
of the eighteenth century a critical reaction set in. 
Tourists, enamoured of the new “ English garden," and 
of Rousseau's descriptions of the “bosquet de Julie," 
could see nothing to admire in the ordered architecture 
of the Borromean Islands. The sentimental sight-seer, 
sighing for sham Gothic ruins, for glades planted “after 
Poussin, ” and for all the laboured naturalism of Repton 
and Capability Brown, shuddered at the frank artifice 
of the old Italian garden-architecture. The quarrel 
then begun still goes on, and sympathies are divided 
between the artificial-natural and the frankly conven- 
tional. The time has come, however, when it is recog- 
nized that both these manners are manners, the one as 
artificial as the other, and each to be judged, not by any 
ethical standard of “sincerity," but on its own aesthetic 
merits. This has enabled modern critics to take a fairer 
view of such avowedly conventional compositions as the 
Isola Bella, a garden in comparison with which the 
grounds of the great Roman villas are as naturalistic as 
the age of Rousseau could have desired. 
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