CASi:\U SACIIEITI AT ROME. 
NOTES ON DECORATI\^ GARDENING. 
By H NOEL HTJMPHEETS, Esq. 
ARCHITECTURAL FEATURES — THEIR PROPER POSITIONS — TRUE GARDENESQUE STYLE. 
roiOWARDS the close of the last century, an exaggerated taste for the simply natural, or -syhat has 
!X been termed the picturesque, banished from English gardens many of their best and most appropriate 
features, — among others, that simple and yet noble adjunct, the terrace. Brown, says Sir Uvedale 
Price, has been celebrated for the bold idea of taking down Richmond Terrace, and his successor, for 
the still bolder notion of blowing up the one at Powis Castle ; while the fine ai-chitectm-al character of 
these features were to be replaced by gently undidating tui-f, and serpentine walks, and these -^s-ind- 
ing forms were not merely used to blend the garden into the landscape, but commenced at once, close 
to the house, where straight lines, in accordance with the forms of the building, were so much more 
appropriate. By this means, the landscajje features were brought into immediate contact with the 
residence, making no difference between the arrangement of the ground close to an architectui'al com- 
position, and that at a distance ; " between the habitation of man and that of sheep." The destruc- 
tion of our fine old terrace-walks, by the race of landscape gardeners of the last century, headed by 
Brown, was partly the result of the extravagant excesses to which architectm-al gardenuig had been 
can-ied, particularly in Fiance and Holland, where the fine taste of the Italian school had been so 
exaggerated as to become caricature; a term which may be fairly applied to the Dutch gardening of 
the end of the seventeenth century, which was imported into this country with the accession of William 
the Third. In this Anglo-Dutch school, the architectm-al decorations were over-elaborated, and de- 
generated into the most wretched taste ; trees were cropped into the forms of com-t ladies ; statuaiy 
reduced to Dutch shepherds, and these shepherds and shepherdesses painted to imitate Dutch natm-e ; 
in addition to which, were multitudes of pretty terraces connected with endless archways and countless 
steps. Such abuses of ai-t found, first, satirists to ridicule them, like Horace Walpole, who laughed at 
the idea of thus " walking up and down stairs in the open an- ;" and then Kent and Brown, bold 
innovators, swept them away, leaving nothing in their place — nothing to form, as it were, the 
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