LANDSCAPE GARDENING 
253 
felled by his orders. He was lost in admiration of the rivers 
and lakes he created. Having completed one of these, he 
thought he had achieved such a success as to surpass the 
Thames, and is said to have exclaimed : " Thames ! Thames ! 
thou wilt never forgive me !” At Hackwood Park, 1 in 
Hampshire, Brown effected various changes, which were thus 
spoken of a few years later : “ Alterations on a considerable 
scale ” were carried out, particularly on the south of the 
house, where there had been a garden “ in the old style, with 
terraces, ascended by flights of steps, and adorned with statues 
on pedestals, a great reservoir of water, angular ramparts, &c. ; 
the view from the house was also interrupted by high yew hedges 
skirting long and formal avenues. Nature has now regained 
her rights ; the avenues have been broken into walks and 
glades, and several distant views admitted.” It never seems 
to have occurred to these landscape-gardeners that an avenue 
and a yew hedge were in themselves beautiful objects. It is 
almost like a Norfolk girl who visited Switzerland, and com¬ 
plained that the mountains shut out the view! Another 
scheme of wholesale devastation he suggested was luckily not 
acted upon. He proposed to blast away that part of the rock 
on which Powis Castle stands, which forms the first or " Sundial 
terrace,” and make it into a flat lawn. This change would have 
been completely out of all keeping with the rest of the lovely 
garden, which had been made in the time of William and Mary, 
by Lord Rochfort, a Dutchman, who for a few years held the 
estates. The alterations he carried out at Burghley were 
also typical of his method. He took away the walls and hedges, 
entirely swept away a terraced kitchen-garden on a slope 
near the house, and in its place planted trees ; beyond this 
wooded eminence of his own creating, and in front of the site 
of the old formal garden, he made a lake. “ How far the 
fashionable array, in which Mr. Brown has dressed the grounds, 
about this venerable building, agrees with its formality, and 
antique appendages, I dare not take upon me to say,” wrote 
Gilpin, a few years after Brown’s work was completed. “ A 
doubt arises,” he continues, “ whether the old decoration of 
avenues and parterres was not in a more suitable style of orna- 
1 Belonging to Lord Bolton. 
