PARK AND CEMETERY. 
1 1 1 
As to the real work of Kent, we have Walpole’s 
gushing description. He tells that his great prin- 
ciples were perspective, and light and shade. That 
he broke too extensive or too uniform a lawn with 
groups of trees. That he emphasized favorable ob- 
jects and veiled deformities by plantations, and 
where animated objects were wanted in his land- 
scape, he resorted to his architectural genius. That 
he taught the streams to meander as they would 
with smooth borders and waving irregularity. That 
he gave freedom to forms of trees and allowed their 
branches to wave unrestricted. Kent’s ideas, he 
says, were rarely great, or his landscapes majestic. 
His clumps were puny and he did not plant for 
maturity. But this was in some measure owing to 
the novelty of his art. He followed nature to ex- 
tremes and even planted dead trees, but was soon 
laughed out of the excess. As he proceeded his 
work improved. Other writers speak of him but 
not always in the same eulogistic terms. It was he 
who destroyed walls for boundaries and harmonized 
the lawn with the park. His practice, too, was to 
go directly to the forest to study sylvan scenery in 
its natural state, which led him to believe that 
beauty was produced exclusively through sublimity. 
Accordingly, he used forest trees and excluded 
shrubs much to the discomfort of the pleasure- 
ground, and with a wrong conception of natural 
beauty, as Scott says of him, “His style is not sim- 
plicity, but affectation laboring to seem simple. ” 
Last, while he was good in design, he was faulty in 
his horticulture. As one looks at his work carefully, 
the conclusion comes that he had enough of an art- 
ist’s instincts to appreciate natural beauty and its 
perception by poets and painters, and that the same 
boldness which allowed him to design everything 
that fashion brought him, enabled him to seize the 
happy moment of taste for the natural to put these 
principles into practice as he had done everything 
else. Landscape Gardening, as it left his hands 
seems crude, even artificial, as it must have been 
with a man of his makeup and at the very begin- 
ning of a new era in gardening. 
Of Brown, much less is said, in fact, much less 
is to be said. His work has been highly extolled 
and as much decried. He had not so great taste 
for picturesque beauty as Kent had and was, besides, 
self-taught. His works were all on the same plan. 
“Whatever was the extent or character of the sur- 
face of his gardens,” Loudon says, “they were all 
surrounded by a narrow belt of trees, and the space 
within distinguished by round or oval clumps, with 
a reach or two of a tame river, generally on differ- 
ent levels.” He had a faculty for shaping surfaces, 
and exhibited it on all occasions without due re- 
gard to nature. His declivities were all softened to 
gentle slopes, while single trees and clumps spotted 
the plantation. His practice of clumping trees was 
notorious as is shown by a story told of him after 
he had become sheriff. He was escorting the judges 
of assize, as was his duty, with a troop of javelin- 
men who were in disorder. This was too much for 
a certain wit who accosted him with, “Brown, 
clump your javelin men.” His management of wa- 
ter, on the other hand, is said not to be excelled. 
He himself was accustomed to boast that “the 
Thames would never forgive him for what he had 
done at Blenheim.” He must have been a man of 
considerable genius as is shown by the number of 
his clients. Indeed, he undertook so much that he 
had not time to work out anything original. Brown 
had a large number of followers, without much abil- 
ity, who soon overdid and corrupted the style, to 
be replaced by the new school of landscape garden- 
ing, the picturesque. Brown’s real work came in 
continuing the style as laid down by Kent, and giv- 
ing satisfaction to a true permanent taste. While 
speaking of the real founders of modern gardening, 
we must not forget Shenstone, a minor poet, who 
suggested the term “landskip” or landscape to be 
applied to modern gardening. 
The style spread over all Europe. Many beau- 
tiful old gardens were destroyed in France to make 
place for the new, and English and French garden- 
ers were in demand throughout the continent. From 
a superficial view of the matter, comparing Kent’s 
gardening with that of to-day, it would seem that 
so far Landscape Gardening was not wholly a suc- 
cess. It does not seem yet to be wholly consistent 
with itself, as the old formal garden was in its in- 
tentions. It was, however, only a beginning. It 
did satisfy that craving for nature which comes 
from a higher civilization, and it was the fore-runner 
of good things to come. Landscape Gardening yet 
has everything before it. 
The causes of this transformation in the garden 
art are not to be neglected. After men began to 
live in homes constructed by art, they gathered 
about them the herbs and fruit whose use they had 
learned. Fences came, and as dwellings became 
more luxurious, walls supplied the place of hedges, 
while within spurred on by a love of variety, grew 
up the regularity and grotesqueness of the formal 
garden. When invention was exhausted, nothing 
remained but to demolish the walls, and let in the 
beauties of the surrounding country. The love of 
nature is a part of the human mind, and it only 
needed the removal of the garden’s barriers to de- 
velope it. The fashion of the formal garden had been 
confined mainly to the gardens of the court who set 
the taste of the nation. “As men became educated,” 
says Loudon, “and began to think for themselves, 
